


After the Snap

by Megabyte4269



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 11:36:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 34,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19744954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megabyte4269/pseuds/Megabyte4269
Summary: This follows Natasha, Clint, and Steve after the events of Infinity War and before Endgame (not Endgame compliant).  After the snap, Natasha searches for Clint to make sure that he is okay.  Along the way her past starts to catch up to her as the trio face her old enemy, Yelena Belova of the Red Room.Sorry about a terrible description and about any grammar errors in anything.





	1. Chapter One

Dust. Dust covered the chairs and part of the table in the tiny farmhouse dining room. A dinner sat on the table untouched for several days. Flies swarmed the remains of a half-eaten rotisserie chicken and now molded green beans. Glasses of milk gone warm had spoiled and filled the surrounding air with a sour smell. An empty high chair. A container half full of baby food. A family gone in an instant. All that remained of the lives they had lived, dust. 

Steve Rogers did not seem to notice any of the details in the room. He only stared at Natasha Romanoff to try and gauge her reaction. He had caught her expressions when they first entered the dining room. They quickly ran through the five stages of grief before he even had a chance to process the situation at hand. They melted away as quickly as they came on, leaving her face blank without emotion. What Steve noticed the most was her eyes. He had seen Natasha on missions before and he recognized her concentration face that she now displayed, but her eyes were different. She normally would have a determined look, but now nothing. She moved like a drone as she examined the scene in front of them. Steve did not recognize this Natasha. 

“There is a bed set up on the couch in the living room. Someone was sleeping there, but it doesn’t look like anyone has been here for at least a week,” Bruce said walking into the dining room. He took a moment to read the room before realizing what he was looking at. Immediately he had the same thoughts as Steve and found himself focused on Natasha. 

“They were all snapped,” Natasha said after a minute of silence. Spinning around she headed out of the house towards the quinjet waiting outside. Steve and Bruce took a moment before reacting to her leaving because it had been so unexpected. The way she had said that statement sounded like these people had meant nothing to her in the world. 

“Natasha!” Steve called racing after her. She walked quickly with purpose, but without running. Bruce scrambled to follow them out after taking one last somber look at the state of the dining room. He briefly wondered if they should do anything or clean anything up, but he pushed it away because most likely no one would be coming back. What would the point be? 

“He might still be alive, Natasha! He could be somewhere trying to get them back!” Steve tried to tell her as she got into the pilot’s seat. Bruce rushed into the back just in time as she started up the engines, clearly not waiting for anyone. 

“No, he’s gone. He would never leave his family. Not for anything. Or anyone…”


	2. Chapter Two

The snap had happened just over a week ago and each remaining member of the team was having different reactions. Bruce handled himself the best by setting himself immediately back to his work. Day and night, he searched for Tony or any chance of recovering his friend from space. They had received a call for help, but could find no way to get to him or even respond. Thor had left only a day after the snap in search of the escaped Asgardians. He had muttered something about needing to find Valkyrie, but only Bruce seemed to actually know what/who he was talking about. 

Steve went through periods where his anger over losing Bucky again made him almost unbearable to be around. He would punch a punching bag for hours at the time that would have destroyed a normal man’s knuckles, but only left his slightly bruised. Every day he wracked his brain trying and trying to come up with a way to reverse the snap, but he couldn’t think of anything. Thanos had disappeared with the gauntlet and any hope of reversal. 

Natasha acted on the outside as if nothing had happened. She disappeared into her own little world and left the rest of them behind. Since visiting the Barton farm, she had only closed herself off more than before. The others noticed that she had hardly slept and spent most of her time going over chatter from her contacts around the world. So much had changed in the past week and she had devoted herself to being up to date with the new world order that remained. Before all else Natasha was still a spy, and spies always know what is going on. 

They had taken up residence in the old Avengers compound that Stark had built after they had moved out of Avengers Tower in New York. The campus was eerily quiet without most of the team being around. The military presence had completely left and all the remained was the three last avengers on Earth. Steve wished that SHIELD was still around so that he would at least have that contact to the outside world still. The solitude was starting to wear on him. 

Just when Steve thought that the situation could not get any worse Thor returned the previous evening and took Banner away. He claimed that he needed Bruce’s help to follow the clues that Valkyrie had left them. Within a week, Steve found himself alone and breaking with only Natasha for company. She barely reacted to the news when Steve told him, but he had expected that. In his life, he lived and died with Bucky and she with Clint. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Steve finally tried broaching the topic over breakfast the morning after Bruce left.

“About Banner leaving? There isn’t really that much to say for me on that topic?” she replied blandly. 

“I didn’t mean about that. But now that you mention it, Banner leaving should actually make you feel a little something at least.” Steve had never really been clear about what exactly had happened between Banner and Natasha. They had appeared to have bonded and perhaps even attracted to each other, but that had never been mentioned since Bruce disappeared for two years. 

“Banner was a work acquaintance,” She countered. Her voice sounded almost robotic and Steve knew that she couldn’t possibly be being honest. He knew Natasha, but parts of her he still could not fully understand. He knew that came with the territory though. He didn’t think anyone could ever fully know a person like Natasha. But right then emotionally, he needed a friend and he knew that she needed one as well. 

“I know that that isn’t remotely true. You two had something going on during the whole Ultron situation so don’t try to lie to me.” Steve stared at her searching her face for any sign of cracking, but she stared down at her cereal to avoid his gaze. 

“In my life, I have used and left a lot of people. I was trained since I was a little girl to manipulate people into doing exactly what I needed or wanted them to do. We didn’t need Banner. We needed Hulk. And I delivered him. I won’t and can’t say that I feel nothing towards Banner, but what I did to him was a job to me…” Natasha said pushing away her half-eaten cereal. Even though Steve had suspected that this had been the situation, he still felt sad to hear it confirmed. He knew that even though Natasha had been able to emotionally detach herself from the situation, Banner most likely could not have. Over the past few years his friendship with her almost made him forget why she was called the Black Widow. 

“We’re not supposed to do those things to our friends,” Steve mused. He spoke honestly and from the heart, even though he knew he might cause Natasha to close down again.

“I did what it took for us to win. No matter what. That is something that as a solider you should understand,” she said firmly. He noticed a bit of edge slipping into her voice. 

“I don’t manipulate people into doing my bidding. I give them the respect that they deserve, and I ask them myself. Manipulation is a spy’s tool,” he countered. 

“I am a spy.” Her words hung in the air for a few minutes with neither of them knowing how to continue the conversation. Natasha wished that he would just move on from the subject and accept that what she had done was for the greater good of the team. She did not want to admit that a part of herself felt shame for the way that she had used Bruce. Of all the people in her life that she had used, Bruce was among the kindest and among the few that she actually had to see again. 

“Have you heard any actionable news? I have been dying to get off this dreary compound,” he finally said after a few minutes. 

“I’ve heard a few interesting tidbits out of Tokyo. I’m hoping to hear more today because some old SHIELD contacts have resurfaced.” After that statement Natasha gathered her cereal bowl and placed it in the sink. She left the room without looking back or so much as saying another word to Steve for the entire day. By the time the day ended his knuckles were bloody and bruised and Natasha was stiff from sitting all day. 

At two o’clock Steve was dreaming peacefully about going to Coney Island with Bucky in the 1940’s. The world around him being his world comforted him and seeing Bucky alive and well made him never want to leave. Suddenly Steve was ripped back into reality by Natasha violently shaking him awake. 

“Up! Up! We need to leave,” she said without explanation. Natasha flipped the lights on and grabbed his go back that sat in the far corner of the room. Unzipping it, she started to check its contents and once satisfied she closed it again. She threw it on the bed next to him and started to go through his dresser pulling out a shirt and some pants for him to wear. 

“Tasha, what is going on?” Steve asked as he pulled on the pants that she’d thrown him. Something about her tone told him that the situation was serious, and he needed to follow her orders. In time like this, Natasha seldom proved wrong.

“I don’t know. I heard some chatter from Tokyo that someone has been sniffing around for Barney Barton. Yesterday is was just idle questions, but today…” she trailed off. 

“Barney?”

“Clint’s older brother. He hasn’t seen or spoken to Barney since he came to Shield with Coulson, but he does keep tabs on him. Makes sure he’s not dead or in prison.”

“Why would Barney be in Tokyo?” Steve questioned. He could and couldn’t believe that Clint had never mentioned his brother before. On the one hand he thought that Clint would have at least mentioned it in passing and on the other Clint had somehow never mentioned his family for years. He searched his thoughts, but he could not actually remember a time that Clint had even mentioned anything about his childhood. He reminded him of Natasha in that way; spies always keep everything close to the chest. 

“He used to work with some people there,” Natasha answered vaguely. 

“What does Barney do?” Natasha did not respond and instead left the room causing the now dressed Steve to race after her with his bag. When he followed her outside, he saw that she had already stowed her bag on the quinjet and had prepped it for a long flight. 

“Its going to be a long flight so you’ll have time to get plenty of rest in the back.” Steve stowed his bag away in the back as Natasha powered up the quinjet. He couldn’t quite believe that fifteen minutes ago he had been sleeping peacefully and now he was on his way to Japan. He wished that would wait until morning to leave because Natasha clearly hadn’t slept in a few days and was in no condition to be piloting an aircraft, even if autopilot did most of the work. 

Steve settled into one of the bunks that pulled down from the walls and stared at the ceiling in an attempt to fall asleep. After a little while Natasha finished setting up the autopilot controls and took her spot in the bunk across from him. He wanted to ask her more questions, but after their earlier conversations he didn’t want to push her too much. Part of him was glad that she had even bothered to include him because of them. He was also glad because he desperately needed to get off the compound after a week and a half of nothing. 

“Barney…” she said sighing, “he’s not exactly the shining star of the Barton family. I can’t tell you much more because its Clint’s secrets not mine. But you should know that Barney is in a similar line of work that Clint and I were both in. Although he more uses a hammer than a gun…” 

“He kills people for money,” Steve stated. He wished at times that Natasha would just come out and clearly say what she meant instead of skirting around the truth. 

“He kills people for money,” she repeated. 

“So…his business in Japan was to murder someone?”

“Assassinate,” she corrected. 

“Murder.”

“Assassination is different.”

“Not really. Not all murders are assassinations, but all assassinations are murders,” he said with special emphasis on the second ‘are’. 

“I’m not going to debate word meanings in a language that’s not even my native language.”

“Don’t pull that bullshit on me, Tasha. I know that they taught you English practically from birth in the Red Room. You just don’t want to be wrong,” he said playfully. After the mention of the Red Room passed his lips, he wanted to take it back. He knew very little about what had happened to Natasha when she was younger, but he did know that she shouldn’t joke about it. 

“Fair enough,” she laughed. His previous worries flashed out of his mind. 

“So, do you think Clint is asking around for Barney?” Steve posed the question that had been nagging at him since they had left the compound. 

“I really hope so,” Natasha breathed. The pair fell to sleep soon after and awoke to the alarm that Natasha had set to warn them when they neared their destination. 


	3. Chapter Three

Natasha had told Steve to wait behind in the café while she went to investigate her hunch. She knew she could move more easily in crowds without him. She had informed him that Captain America tended to stand out anywhere that he went, but especially in the streets of Tokyo. Luckily the rain had been coming down for a few hours now and she found herself able to hide her face under her umbrella. 

Her sources had told her that there would be an information exchange between a low-ranking Yakuza member and whoever was asking about Barney at 9 pm. She rushed to the location of the meeting as the time ticked closer and she knew that she would be slightly late. Hurrying up she found it hard to keep her emotions in check as she thought about Clint being there. She had told Steve that he would stand out too much, but there was a real reason that she made him stay behind. She couldn’t bear to show too many emotions around him. He was already too weak from losing Bucky and the rest of the team, so she couldn’t allow him to feel pity for her as well. 

Natasha heard the sounds of a fight as she neared the street where the meet was supposed to be taking place. Unfortunately, she didn’t hear the familiar twang of a bow being unleashed, but there was still hope. When she turned the corner on the street, she saw the road lined with dead bodies and a single figure of a man standing in the center. He stood with his back to her, but he glanced over his shoulder to show her he acknowledged her presence. 

Her heart crept into her throat when she stared at the man’s silhouette. She recognized the way he held his body. She recognized the way he moved. He stood up straight and pull a long sword across his arm to wipe the blood. Slowly he turned his head and pulled the mask off his face. Clint turned towards her with the sword pointing at her chest. 

“Tasha,” he breathed. He dropped the sword to the ground when he recognized her face. Tears welled in her eyes when she saw what had become of her best friend. Surrounded by dead bodies that he had just murdered. Tears welled in her eyes with joy too at seeing her best friend again. He was alive. 

“We need to go,” she said holding out her hand to him. She couldn’t explain what came over her to make such an intimate gesture towards him. Something in her told her that she desperately needed to reach out to him. 

“They’re all gone, Tasha.” He spoke so softly that Natasha could barely hear him over the twenty feet that separated them. 

“We can’t do this here, Clint. We need to go now,” she tried to impress upon him. He remained very still just staring at the carnage around him. 

“I was just trying to see if Barney is okay.”

“They will be back.” As she spoke, she knew that her words were making no impact. In fact, it seemed as if he could not even hear her.

“I can’t lie actually. I knew these guys wouldn’t lead me to him. I just wanted a fight,” he admitted. At that moment, Natasha’s heart broke. 

“Clint, if you come with me now, I promise I will protect you. I promise that I am going to help you. I promise to give you a home again,” she said almost pleadingly. These words registered with Clint unlike all the others because he had played them over in his head a thousand times. All those years ago, he had spoken those exact words to Natasha in a street not unlike this one. He had kept his promise to the best of his ability and he knew that Natasha would do the same. 

Slowly he scanned the street around him one last time before walking towards her. He took her still outstretched hand and gripped it tight. They watched their backs carefully as they left the deserted street littered with dead bodies. Soon it would be swarming with police and others desperate for answers, but for now all was calm. Still hand in hand they made their way back to where Steve sat alone in a café booth. They took their time as they walked under the umbrella, but neither of them dared to speak out in the open. 

When they reached the café, Natasha went inside alone to retrieve Steve. Clint was still wearing his other suit that was covered in quite a bit of blood. Needless to say, he would be less than welcome inside in the bright light for all to see. Luck would have it that it was a dreary rainy night that hide the blood on the dark suit making passersby assume he had merely been caught in the storm. Natasha emerged a few minutes later with a few to-go coffees and Steve trailing behind her. 

Steve looked overjoyed to see another member of his team still alive and well. The worry lines of the past week melted away as he smiled at Clint. He even pulled his blood covered friend into a tight hug despite the mess. The understanding of what the blood meant came to him a few moments later, but he brushed those thoughts aside. He knew that he would be filled in on the complete story once they returned to the quinjet or found someplace safe to stay the night.

Clint explained that he had an old safehouse that he had used back in his shield agent days where they could stay. He did make sure to mention that even though it was a relic of Shield it was completely off the books and could not be traced back to him by leaked Shield documents. Luckily the safehouse was only a few streets away so they were able to walk there without needing a cab. The less people that met Clint in his current state the better. 

“Home sweet home,” Clint said as he opened the door. The old apartment clearly hadn’t been used in years because a thick layer of dust had gathered over the entire place. The building itself had a back entrance tucked in a dark alleyway that they used. They had then creeped up the back stairs and come to the tiny one-bedroom apartment. The furniture looked as though a grandmother had once lived there and left her furniture behind; a fact that Clint confirmed when Steve asked. 

No sooner had they arrived in the apartment did Clint declare he needed a shower and left the room. Steve and Natasha awkwardly stood for a moment in shock before trying to see what amenities the apartment had for them. They discovered a few old musty blankets in a closet by the front door that they would use to make a bed on the couch. The whole apartment was one small room that had a kitchen to the right and living room to the left when entering the apartment. The bedroom was to the left of the living room with the bathroom inside. The kitchen closet came equipped with a washer and dryer that overjoyed Natasha as she threw the blankets in to wash. 

“Sorry I just hate how this place smells. I’ll never be able to sleep wrapped in a blanket smelling like an old dead woman,” she explained. Her mood had drastically improved with Clint’s presence. 

“This whole place smells like an old woman,” Steve reminded her. 

“I have to say. This is one of Clint’s nicer safehouses. Most of them look like a room with a mattress on the floor and a duffel bag in the corner. This one is at least homey…” she mused. 

“Unfortunately, I’ve only had the chance to use it a few times. Somehow, I always get stuck going to the cities where I live in shitholes,” Clint chimed in as he emerged from the bedroom. The tension became thick as everyone now stood in the same room. Natasha and Steve dying to ask about what was happening vs Clint who desperately wanted to forget everything for a while. They stood at odds without knowing what to say for a few minutes before Steve broke the silence.

“Did you find Barney?” he asked. Clint looked at him with a confused expression because he knew for a fact, he never mentioned Barney to anyone except Natasha. He knew that she must have told Steve, but he didn’t like anyone mentioning his brother. 

“He wasn’t there, but I’m fairly certain he survived the snap. Natasha, there is something that I need to tell you,” Clint replied. The others leaned forward eagerly even though they could tell by Clint’s face the news wasn’t going to be good. Clint gave Steve a look that told him that this news should not include him. 

“You can say was it is,” Natasha said giving permission. Clint shrugged. 

“Yelena escaped.”


	4. Chapter Four

“How is this possible? She was being watched night and day. They must have not been following the protocol Coulson put into place,” Natasha sputtered. 

“I don’t know how its possible. I know that the CIA took over her containment, but after that I lost track of her,” Clint tried to explain. 

“How do you know she escaped?”

“Because I saw her at the market today. She waved at me and then disappeared into the crowd. I know its been a long time since I’ve seen her, but I will never forget her face.” Natasha got tense all over as Clint was telling her the news. She hadn’t thought about Yelena for years at this point and had hoped to never really think of her again. That wicked girl had nearly destroyed everything when Natasha first came to Shield. 

“Who is Yelena?” Steve asked inserting himself back into the conversation. For those few moments Clint and Natasha had forgotten that he sat next to them. They had spoken lost in their own little world of understanding. 

“Yelena Dmitrievna Belova. She trained with me at the Red Room and took my place as Black Widow once I defected to Shield. We have had her in Shield custody since 2005,” Natasha told him. 

“Putting her away nearly killed both Natasha and me,” Clint offered. The two did not appear eager to share anymore information with Steve. As soon as they had given his that small amount, they’d turned back towards each other signaling for Steve that he had been given enough for now. He wished that they would include him a little more considering it appeared that a rich backstory existed there. 

“Are you coming with us?” Natasha asked Steve. He then realized that he had zoned out of the rest of their conversation and had been lost in her own head. He embarrassingly had to ask them to clarify. 

“We could use your help to take down Yelena,” Clint said with a hopeful smile.

“Of course. Anything to take my mind off the snap.” The whole atmosphere of the room changed as soon as he mentioned the snap. He felt regret for changing the dynamic when he saw how Clint’s face fell. Natasha watched her friend struggling and looked at Steve with almost pleading eyes. He had never seen such an expression from her before; Natasha was usually so emotionless. 

For Steve the loss had been a constant that lingered in the back of his mind for years now. Part of him had never truly gotten over losing his whole life in the 1940’s. That part of him in constant pain had changed into a dull ache that never left him. He felt stabs of pain when he remembered a fond memory, but for the most part he pushed it to the back of his mind once he had something to preoccupy his time. Now with losing Bucky again he felt like he had just woken up from the ice all over again. The pain was a mixture of new and old. An old wound reopened. He found strength from knowing that he had survived it before and could do so again. He did not see that same strength in Clint. 

Sitting hunched over himself at the time kitchen bar the man looked distraught. Tears bubbled in his eyes and his throat got all choked up. The thought of his children invaded every moment of his day for the past week. Only in those precious moments talking with Steve and Natasha did the ache dull into the background, but he knew that it would soon be back. He stared at Natasha smiling reassuringly at him, but instead he saw his daughter in Natasha’s lap. His older daughter had just been born a few days before and Natasha came to meet her. Although she could see his happiness Natasha had also see that Clint was scared shitless of the tiny child. She had given him the same reassuring smile that she gave him now. At the very beginning of his daughter’s life and at the very end.

Natasha couldn’t bare the pain that she saw in her friend’s eyes, so she would try to be strong for both of them. She had always been better than Clint at pushing down her emotions and locking them away. In fact, she had been better from most people that she had known since Red Room. She told herself that losing the team was in no way as difficult as losing your children, but in her heart, she knew it wasn’t true. Even though she hadn’t been close with Tony in a long time, she felt his loss especially. Cap had been right when he had said ‘earth lost its best defender’. 

They had all long since retired for the night and Natasha found herself unable to sleep. She was laying on the couch with Steve snoring on the floor next to her. She played over the events of the past two weeks over and over in her head. What could she have done differently? If only they had destroyed Vision earlier… But she knew that was a horrible thought to have. She snapped to attention when she heard rustling in the apartment. It took her a second to recognize it was the sound of Clint moving restlessly just like her. Carefully she snuck her way around Steve and made her way into the bedroom to find Clint. 

“They told me that if I stayed on the farm, they would be safe. They dusted right in front of me and I couldn’t do anything about it. Laura went first… the kids started to scream…” Clint whispered. His voice started to give out as he got choked up. 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save them.” Natasha knew these words gave little comfort, but it was all that she could think to say. Perhaps if she could have fought harder then the snap would never have happened. Maybe if they had killed the children of Thanos when they had the chance it all would have changed. 

“If I had been there, I could have helped. I could have done something…” he breathed. 

“With the infinity stones we never stood a chance…” Natasha murmured into his arm. She leaned against him with her forehead resting on his shoulder. He leaned back against the headboard and wrapped his arm around her pulling her in. At that moment he needed his best friend to be close to him, and she needed him.

“You’re right. To believe that I could have made a difference with my bow and arrow. That is stupid…” Natasha gazed up at his face and he gave her a small sad smile. 

“I’m glad that you weren’t there. You deserved to spend every second that you can with your family. Laura and the kids needed you.” As much as it pained Natasha, she knew that it was the truth. She had kept Clint away from his family for too much time in the past years. 

“When New York was attacked I tried to leave, but Laura said if I left, I could never come back. I’d been sleeping on the couch for months now. But I couldn’t walk away from my kids. Laura and I’s relationship can crash and burn, but I couldn’t leave them. Not ever…” he told her. Natasha didn’t know what to say in response. She couldn’t imagine the amount of regret that Clint must have been carrying with him. He wished he could change everything. He wanted to talk to his kids one last time. He wanted to talk to Laura and tell her he was sorry. More than anything he wanted to tell her sorry. She hadn’t signed up for him to never be at home with her or the kids. She hadn’t signed up for him to miss the birth of two of his children because he was on a mission for Shield. She certainly hadn’t signed up for him to have one foot out of the door for their entire marriage. But his children, he loved his children. 

“How many did we lose?” Clint asked about fifteen minutes of silence. He felt Natasha got stiff in his arms. 

“Thanos ripped the stone right out of Vision’s head. Wanda dusted. T’Challa was dusted. Tony is lost in space and we have no way to get to him. I don’t know what happened to Peter. Bruce is alive actually and he’s been hanging out with Thor for a while. We didn’t really get a chance to catch up. I’m just rambling at this point…” she said wringing her hands. Clint hugged her closely to reassure her that she should keep talking. He knew that she never shared her feelings openly, but this was too turbulent of a week to not talk about it. 

“What happened to James?”

“He’s gone,” she said holding back tears. 

“I’m so sorry, Tasha.”

“He didn’t even remember me…” 

“You say that like you think that means you cannot mourn him,” he comforted. Natasha could not hold in the tears any longer and she started to cry. Ugly cry. Sobs wracked her body as Clint held her in the middle of the night. He knew that she wasn’t just crying about James, but the whole team. She wept for Tony being lost, for Peter’s unknown fate, for Vision’s horrific death, for Wakanda’s destruction, for everyone. He knew that in the morning she would lock her emotions away tightly in her heart, yet for now she needed a chance to feel something.


	5. Chapter Five

As Natasha finally relaxed in Clint’s bed, she dreamt of her first meeting with James Buchanan Barnes all those years ago. Her mind remembered if as if it had been yesterday. The years melted away and Natasha felt herself in her nineteen-year-old body again. She was no longer Natasha, but Natalya. Already a veteran of the most difficult missions the Red Room could offer, she developed an heir of confidence. Many of the other girls despised her for her excellence, but more than anything they wanted to be like her.

Of the 28 original girls to train under Ivan Petrovitch Bezukhov in her class only 20 remained at this point in the program. Most of the others had failed in the early weed out training because Ivan would expect nothing less than perfection from his girls. 20 girls dressed in their finest cloths stood in a line across the dance study where they ordinarily practiced ballet. Each stood with their backs perfectly straight and staring directly ahead. They knew that if Ivan saw them out of place in a formal rollcall, they would be severely punished. 

“My little daughters, I have the great pleasure of introducing you to your newest combat instructor. He has arrived from Moscow. I hope that you will show him the utmost respect,” Ivan proclaimed. He walked slowly back and forth down the line of girls to inspect their reactions to his news and their overall behavior. He stopped in front of Natalya on the far-left side of the line and gave her a sadistic smile. Natalya hated it when he would single her out in front of the group like that because it meant she was going to be attacked later tonight. She figured that Ivan knew about the attacks, but she could not understand why he would want to put his best student though that. 

Standing directly to her right, Yelena Belova hid her disdain well when this close to her keepers, but Natalya could feel the girl’s rage. Her loathing for her ‘sister’ was palpable, and she would be the one to make the first strike tonight. The next morning Natalya would have to rush to put makeup on to cover her bruises. If she did not then all of the girls would be punished for fighting, and Natalya would be disciplined further for not being able to defend herself. The Red Room did not offer a nurturing environment. 

The girls’ attention left Natalya when Ivan walked over to open the door to show their new instructor into the room. A buzz of excitement filled the air as the dark looming figure of a tall man stomped into the room. His combat boots stomped heavy on the floors that made one of the girls flinch when he first walked in. Unfortunately for her Ivan noticed, and she would be disciplined later. Many of the girls admired his broad frame and long unruly brown hair that fell into his face. Others like Natalya and Yelena felt their gaze drawn to the silver cybernetic arm with the red star embossed on the side. 

“Winter Soldier,” Natalya breathed. The girls had all heard tales of the great Soviet hero the Winter Soldier. He had been the ultimate weapon for the Russian cause. Unknown to the common people, but a legend of the Red Room. Ivan had at one point gloated that much of his knowledge had come from working along side him. 

“The Winter Soldier will be training you, my daughters, for the next three months. I do not need to tell you what an honor you have been given. Do not disappoint me. And more importantly do not disappoint your country,” Ivan said with a twisted smile. 

That had been the fist moment that she had laid eyes on the Winter Soldier, but she would not meet him until later that night. Natalya’s mind glazed over the rest of the daytime because her memory faulted her. Winter Soldier hadn’t actually started training them that day. Instead he had evaluated their skills by watching them spare each other. Natalya did remember how Ivan had sung her praises in front of the other girls. She also remembered how during their nightly shower the other girls had cornered her in the bathroom. 

As she so often did, Natalya found herself in the bathroom at trying to patch herself up to lessen her work for the next morning. Unfortunately, a cut ran just along her hairline looked a little too deep to just wipe away the blood. She would need to sneak into the infirmary to get first aid supplies. Carefully she tiptoed out of the bunk room and into the hallway. To get to the infirmary she would need to go up to the third floor without anyone noticing her, but that had never been an issue. 

She moved quickly with her toes barely touching the ground to make the least amount of noise possible. She hoped to be in and out of the infirmary in thirty seconds, but fate had other plans. She was in the middle of picking the lock on the door when she heard a sound. A creaky floorboard. Snapping into attention, she looked for a place to hide, but the hallway had no crevices or open doors to be seen. Then the door came free and she dashed inside. Breathing hard, Natalya hide behind one of the cabinets and waited to hear more noises. After a few minutes of silence, she deemed the situation safe again. Gathering her supplies, Natalya headed back into the hallway.

“What are you doing out of bed?” a low voice asked from behind her. Natalya’s blood ran cold when she recognized the voice of the Winter Soldier. She whirled around with her face changing from surprise to a smile. She planned to do exactly what she did every other time she’d been caught breaking the rules. She’d sleep with the guard. Fail proof. 

“Looking for you,” she said seductively. Natalya fluffed her hair slightly and bit her lip, but he did not seem to be responding like she expected. Even though she was wearing a tank top, he hadn’t glanced down at her boobs once. His eyes showed confusion and he ran his fingers nervously through his long hair. She looked him over a little to see what she would be getting herself into. He wore a simple pair of sweatpants and white wife-beater that showed off his arm. Of all the men she had had to sleep with he might actually be the least gross among them. 

“Somehow I doubt that you were looking for me in the infirmary…” he said. As he spoke Natalya came to a startling realization: the great hero of the Soviet Union was not Russian. She realized that he had not spoken at all during training that day, but now she heard his accent clearly. American. Perhaps Canadian. Not Russian. Her interest in him grew exponentially in that moment. 

“No, but meeting you is a happy accident,” she pivoted. Natalya reached out her hand to stroke the Soldier’s real arm. At this point she wasn’t quite sure if he could feel with his cybernetic one. He shocked her by flinching away from her touch. 

“Do you need help stitching your forehead?” he asked. This caught her out of the blue. She expected that he would notice her injury; anyone would have. What she did not expect was that he would care about it in the slightest. Any other guard would have ignored it and gone in for the kiss already. 

“I can do it myself.” She felt completely off her rhythm and wasn’t sure how to proceed with the situation. What was she supposed to do with a person that didn’t want to sleep with her? How would she ensure that he didn’t tell Ivan about her late-night adventure? 

“At least come into my room. We can turn the light on in there?” He noticed Natalya’s face change for a brief moment when he asked her. He saw her confusion and even fear because she couldn’t understand his motive. 

“Okay…” she stammered. 

“It’s just here,” he said gesturing to a room down the hall. She followed him apprehensively and kept checking around her for signs of a trap. She figured that he wouldn’t be trying to set her up and if he was it was already too late for her. 

His room was smaller than she had expected. She expected that they would roll out the red carpet for someone as respected as the Winter Soldier, but his room was little more than a cell. A small bed on the left and one walked in the door and a dresser and a desk on the right. A lamp on a rickety old metal night stand cast a warm glow over the otherwise frigid room. Luckily, she noticed he had a woolen blanket on his bed to keep him warm. Ivan didn’t believe in heating any room except his own offices during the winter, so woolen blankets were essential to survival. 

He shut the door behind them and gestured to her to sit on his bed. In the light outside of the training room Natalya was able to focus on his face. She noticed just how young he really looked; he looked no more than twenty-five/six. She had heard stories from when she first started at the Red Room about the famous Winter Soldier, but this man was far too young to be the same man. He had stubble on his face that made him appear older, yet underneath she saw his youth like herself. 

“You are Ivan Petrovitch’s favorite, Natalya,” he said as a half question to confirm her identity. 

“I wouldn’t say that I’m his favorite,” she corrected. He scoffed at her and shook his head.

“The other girls seem to think so. One of the blonde girls called you ‘Ivan’s little pet’ while you were sparing,” he said as he sat on the bed next to her. He made sure to leave as much space as he could between the two of them. 

“If I really am his favorite, then why would he allow me to be attacked by the other girls?” Natasha laid out her first aid supplies on the bed between them. She started to clean her forehead of the dried blood, but that seemed to reopen the wound. 

“It will make you stronger. Are you sure I can’t help you?” he asked as she struggled with blood dripping down her face. 

“Okay…” she whispered. Natalya felt so off kilter being around a man that appeared to genuinely want to help her. She needed him to have some kind of angle. She could handle men with ulterior motives, but a man without one was a total mystery to her. 

He gently took the cloth from her hand and started to dab at her forehead. He noticed how far he had to reach to help her, so he moved closer to her on the bed. Up close to her face she noticed he had lovely eyes. He told her to hold the cloth to her forehead to still the bleeding while he got the supplies ready to stitch her up. 

“Can you please not tell Ivan about all this?” Natalya asked. 

“Ivan Petrovitch need never know. Now hold your head still,” he ordered her. He tilted her head so that he could see the wound more clearly. He then asked her to keep her hair back as much as she could manage. All business, he set to stitching up her wound neatly and quickly. Within five minutes he had finished and moved away from her once more. 

Natalya felt indebted to him for his help and she did not like this feeling at all. She detested when she knew that someone had power over her. With the environment at the Red Room she often felt helpless at the whim of her trainers or handlers, so liked to keep as much control over every other aspect of her life. Although she had failed at her advances earlier, Natalya reverted back to her training that taught her all men were the same. He had done her a service and now she owed him. She pushed herself forward on the bed to close the gap between them and also push her boobs out more prominently. Instead of leaning into her as she hoped, he got up from the bed and strode to the opposite side of the room to lean against the desk. 

“I am trying to repay you for your help,” she explained. She made her best doe eyed face that no man had ever resisted before. 

“You should go back to bed, Natalya.” She noticed his tone had changed from when he had spoken to her before. A bit of softness had crept in. Although Natalya would not know until much later, Natasha knew that this was a small part of James breaking through the Winter Soldier programming. In that moment she met her James for the first time. He had kindly told her to go to bed instead of taking advantage of a broken traumatized young girl. 

As she returned to the present day in her head Natasha felt thankful for those girls attacking her that night in the shower. Without it she may never have met James in the halls during their time together. James became her first real friend since she had become a part of the Red Room. Without him, she would never have been emotionally open enough to listen to Clint and join Shield. James taught her to feel. 

She remembered how her mind swam that entire night after their first meeting. She had been treated for the first time with basic human decency, and yet for her it was revolutionary. What should have been ordinary became extraordinary. Once the Red Room took that away when they took James from her, they lost Natasha’s loyalty. 

For a short time, Bucky had returned to the team and Natasha had gotten the chance to be around him once more. But Bucky had returned, not James. Parts of him remained, but other parts of James had been lost forever. He remembered things little by little over time, and yet never her. She felt stabs in the heart each time he and Steve talked about their childhood memories knowing that she would never get to reminisce with him. She couldn’t tell him though. What could he possibly say to her? ‘I’m so sorry I don’t remember loving you or even meeting you.’ 

At least she had Clint though. Clint knew about everything that had occurred between her and James all those years ago. She had a friend to confide her pain in when Bucky returned. And now she had that friend for her to lean on now that he was gone again. And the hope of him ever remembering her dusted with him. 


	6. Chapter Six

The next morning Clint left early to see about finding some food for them to eat. The only food he had in the kitchen was some old canned goods that were several years out of date. Still edible, but not ideal. They only planned on staying in Tokyo for the next day, but they still needed something to eat. 

Steve had woken up that morning to find himself alone in the living room. He found Clint and Natasha sleeping against each other in the bedroom. He felt a pang of loneliness knowing that he had lost his best friend and Natasha had just found hers. He missed Bucky. The other two woke up a start when he opened the bathroom door. Natasha had a guilty expression on her face as she made eye contact with Steve. Clint vaulted out of the bed and mumbled about going to get food for them all. 

Steve leaned against the counter in the kitchen while drinking a cup of coffee. He had found some coffee and green tea hidden in the back of the cabinet. He knew that Clint would never touch green tea, but Natasha loved it. She had obviously been around for a while because it had expired in 2005. He had never heard a specific time period for her defection to Shield, but this would put her at only around 20 years old. She had been so young. 

“If I’m going to help you guys, I need to know more about what happened with Yelena,” Steve said when Natasha came into the kitchen. 

“What do you want to know?”

“So, you grew up with her?” he asked. Steve hadn’t exactly expected her to be willing to answer most of his questions. He wanted her to speak freely about the situation instead of him asking specific questions. 

“Yelena came to the Red Room when she was six years old. I was five at the time.” She stopped and waited for him to ask more questions. He knew that this wasn’t going to be easy. 

“Were you friends?” Natasha was about to answer when Clint came back in through the door cradling a grocery bag in his arms. He kicked the door closed and headed over to join his friends in the kitchen. 

“Whatcha guys talking about?” Clint started unloading the groceries and looked over expectantly at his friends for an answer.

“Natasha is telling me about her friend, Yelena,” Steve answered. Clint laughed. 

“No one had friends in the Red Room.” Again, she replied without giving much information. 

“Dammit, Natasha. You always say that we’re friends, but you won’t tell me anything. You guys asked me to help you, and yet I’m the only one that is going into this whole thing blind!” Steve said his voice rising. 

“Steve…” Clint cautioned. 

“I don’t want to hear it from you, Clint. You’re not any better than her. You both have your secrets that you never tell anyone!”

“You want to read about what happened on the mission with Yelena then you can read what I dumped online with Shield files,” Natasha chimed in calmly. 

“I don’t want to read the official file. I want _my friend_ to tell me what really happened to her. What really happened because you and I both know how different the files are from life.” 

“I will tell you what you need to know. But can you understand for a moment how hard it might be for me to relive these memories. With this and the snap…I…” Natasha started.

“Don’t bring the snap into this, Natasha. Can you answer me one question about the snap? Huh? Who did you lose, Natasha?” Steve yelled. All of his anger and rage that had been building up over the years came out in that moment. He wasn’t angry at Natasha, but he was angry at the world. Unfortunately, Natasha was there when it all came out. 

“You don’t have the right to tell me I can’t grieve! You don’t know what I’ve lost…” she said her voice breaking. Clint stepped in between the pair with his back-facing Natasha. 

“Steve, you need to go cool down,” he warned. 

“Fine. I’ll go cool down. But you know I’m telling the truth. You’re the only person that Natasha had before and you’re all she has now. She can’t pretend to know what I’m feeling because she’s never really cared about anyone except you,” Steve said with venom in his voice. At that he marched out of the kitchen and slammed the bedroom door behind him. 

Natasha stared blankly at the closed window above the kitchen sink. They had closed it to make sure to block out any prying eyes, but at this moment she desperately wanted to see the real world. She couldn’t help but feel that part of what Steve had said was true. She hadn’t lost someone in the snap like everyone else. Sure, she had lost friends, but those closest to her remained. She felt the loss of Bucky more than others, and yet it was incomparable to when she had lost her James all those years ago. 

She wished that she could share more about her life with Steve. The business with Yelena so closely aligned with her time with James that it made it difficult to tell a complete story. She couldn’t tell Steve about James, and then she couldn’t explain the complexity of her relationship with Yelena. The two had always been competitive growing up in the Red Room. Then when she found out about Natalya’s elicit contact with the Winter Soldier, Yelena fumed at the thought of her rival receiving special treatment. First Ivan’s favorite, then the Soldier’s. 

Segments of her life existed too that she had shoved down into order to attempt to block out the horrific memories. She had not been lying to Steve when she said that she did not want to relive parts of her past. Most of them she had told to Clint when she first came on board with Shield. They had been spoken on late nights when neither could sleep from the nightmares of their past. Sitting together in the dark they recounted the horrors of their lives. Companionship gave them peace. Natasha had no desire to disturb her peace. 

As much as Clint loved and respected Steve, he knew that his friend’s anger had gotten the best of him. His priority became keeping a fragile peace between Natasha and Steve for the time being. He knew once Steve calmed down, he would apologize, but it would be a long time before that wound healed for Natasha. Clint could understand Steve’s reasoning for wanting to know more, but he would also not betray Natasha’s trust in him to tell more. It had taken a lot of time for him to wear Natasha down enough for her to confide in him. Steve had not been forced into the same situations with her as he had. He had been there for her when the nightmares kept her from sleeping for days on end. And his presence had earned her trust. Steve just needed more time.

Steve emerged from his room about a quarter hour later. He still carried himself like an angry man, but he seemed to have decided he would be civil. Natasha looked more guarded than Clint had seem her in a long time. She made herself smaller against the kitchen cabinets. It reminded Clint of when he had first brought her into Shield. She had hoped to convince everyone that she wasn’t the threat that they thought, even thought that couldn’t have been further from the truth. 

“Is there any chance that Yelena could have just been there by coincidence?” Steve said addressing Clint. 

“No,” Clint and Natasha answered together. 

“Yelena is far too smart for that,” Natasha continued. 

“Smart people have coincidences happen to them too,” Steve cautioned.

“Yelena has no contacts in Japan. No reason to be here. Perhaps if we’d seen her in the streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg, not in Tokyo. The Red Room never did much business here,” Natasha explained. 

“Then what is she after?”

“I would imagine the two people that destroyed her life,” Clint chimed in. 

“Why would she deliberately court two of the most dangerous people in the world when she is totally unfamiliar with the current world. Shouldn’t she just lie low for a while,” Steve posed. 

“Or she has just spent over ten years imagining how she is going to kill us,” Natasha countered. 

“She’s baiting us. And we have to follow,” Clint stated. 

“Why would we follow her? You are suggested walking into a trap!” 

“You won’t like what happens if we don’t,” Natasha said lost in thought. 

“What will happen?”

“A lot of innocent people will die. We have to kill her this time,” Clint said. Natasha nodded in agreement. 

“Is there no way that we could turn her? Clint brought you in to Shield, and you were part of the Red Room too,” Steve posed. He did not like the idea of going after someone with the intention of killing them. He knew that sometimes it proved necessary, but to plan it out was something different. 

“No. Yelena is the perfect Widow. She has no heart,” Natasha said.

“I thought that you were the perfect Widow. You turned.” Natasha looked over at Clint for a moment as if deciding whether or not to keep speaking. He gave her a little smile, but no other advice.

Natasha paused for a moment before speaking. “I was the perfect Widow, but that ended long before Clint met me…” She paused again. “I fell in love with someone, and it all changed. I changed.” Steve noticed the change in Natasha. In her posture she had curled up into herself and her eyes stared at the floor. Her defiance ceased to exist. He saw the person that he had seen all those years ago in Sam’s house. 

“What happened to him?” Steve felt unsure if she would answer his question. He noticed Clint place his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. 

“Yelena took him from me, and so I took everything from her.” 

“And now she’s back for her revenge,” Clint added. 

“He was the first person that I’d ever loved. Until Clint and Coulson. Until the team. Now everyone is gone,” Natasha said. 

“I know what it feels like to lose everyone. I’m sorry, Natasha. I’m sorry, Clint” Steve said earnestly. Steve’s apology wiped away the tension in the room. The three knew that each one of them had experienced more than enough trauma in the past two weeks. They didn’t need to fight among themselves. All broken people, but all healing together. 


	7. Chapter Seven

A little over a week had passed since the trio had cleared out of the Tokyo safehouse. They now sat at a small table in front of a little café near the downtown of Moscow. The place looked out of the way enough that no one would really be watching them. Still Steve kept his head down mostly with his baseball cap covering his face. 

“Спасибо,” Natasha said as the waiter set a tea down in front of her. Steve had been at a loss since they had arrived the previous day. He had spent very little time as a spy and he felt uncomfortable with the idea of having to operate in the shadows. He much preferred to be a soldier out in the open. No sneaking. 

Steve sat hunched over the table and nervously fidgeted with the spoon in his coffee cup. Natasha’s source should be at their table in about five minutes and he was starting to get impatient. He didn’t understand how Clint and Natasha could be acting so nonchalant. Steve would have felt a lot more comfortable if he could understand the people talking around him. 

“You need to calm down,” Natasha said echoing his thoughts. 

“Извините, девушка,” an old man said bumping into Natasha’s chair. If Steve hadn’t already been suspicious, he would have missed him slipping something into Natasha’s jacket pocket. As quickly as it happened, it was over with the old man walking away to another table. It took him a minute to connect the dots that the source had been there the entire time but had chosen the moment from coming back from the bathroom to run into Natasha.

“Ничего, ничего,” Natasha called to the man.

If Natasha was pleased with the exchange, Steve didn’t know because she betrayed nothing with her face. She simply continued to sip her tea as if nothing had happened. A few minutes of idle chit chat and the bill was paid. Steve followed Natasha and Clint as they made their way back to the little hotel room that they had moved into. They dared not talk about anything until they were safely inside the room. The previous night they had swept for any bugs, so they knew they could speak freely. 

Natasha pulled a thumb drive out of her jacket pocket. She fished around in her bag and pulled out her laptop. On the third try she got the USB to enter the right way and pulled up the folder. It looked like a few photos and a message. She pulled up one of the photos and Steve saw her eyes narrow. It was a surveillance video of two men meeting at a café not unlike the one that they had just visited. The time stamp showed two days ago in St. Petersburg. 

“Я нашла бас, Юрий,” Natasha muttered. Steve didn’t understand what she had meant, but he recognized Yuri as a name. Clint flinched when he heard the name. He remembered hearing about what Yuri had done to those girls in the Red Room. Of all the guards for Yelena to recruit, why did it have to be him? But he supposed, she wanted Natasha to be clouded by her emotions. He felt nervous for seeing how Natasha would react to Steve’s questions. Besides Yelena, Clint couldn’t think of anyone that Natasha wanted to talk about less. It had been almost a year into their partnership before she had mentioned him.

“Do I even need to ask the question?” Steve said as Natasha examined the document with the pictures. All the writing was in Russian so Steve couldn’t understand any of it. 

“Yuri was a guard at the Red Room. He was a little sadistic,” Clint informed him. Natasha was so concentrated on the documents that she appeared to have not heard the question. 

“A little sadistic…” she laughed. Apparently, she had been listening. 

“Were he and Yelena friends?” Steve asked. 

“Umm…no. If anything, he was actually worse to her than me. He _liked_ the blonde ones.” At that statement Steve got the information he wanted to know about Yuri. He of course had assumed that Yuri had just beaten the girls, but what Natasha implied was much worse. 

“Why would she use him then?” Steve had to imagine there must have been better options than someone like this. 

“He’s excellent bait. She knows that I won’t be able to resist him. Plus, it’s easy to make Yuri do whatever you want for a screw,” she spoke nonchalantly. Steve and Clint both winced.

“Do you know the other man in the photo?” Clint asked changing the subject. Natasha shook her head, but the file that her contact had left identified him as a low-level arms dealer. It also specified that the dealer and Yuri had a meeting set for the next morning by a warehouse in St. Petersburg. She knew that that was exactly where Yelena hoped that she would go, but the chance to nail Yuri was too good to pass up. She informed the others on her information and they almost immediately set off for their next destination.


	8. Chapter Eight

“Без пяти восемь,” Natasha muttered checking her watch. She, Clint, and Steve were all perched by a window directly overlooking where the meeting was to be held. They all laid flat on their stomachs just barely peering over the edge to see if their targets had arrived yet. Clint had his rifle ready to go as he searched the area gathering as much information as he could. 

Once the party arrived Natasha and Steve would head down to the first level of the building in order to pop out and surprise Yuri and his men. Clint would provide cover fire and warn them of any reinforces headed their way. Crouching behind the window, Steve felt more alive than he had anytime in the past two weeks. He was a soldier and he needed a fight. All of the sneaking around for the past week had been wearing on him and the others could tell. He wasn’t used to the weeks long intelligence gathering missions like they were. 

Clint also felt more at home than he had since he left the Avengers after being rescued from prison by Steve. He loved his family, but nothing made him feel alive quite like staring down the barrel of the rifle. He could never truly be happy with life on the ground. He watched Natasha carefully as she muttered the time to herself over and over again in Russian. He knew that the thought of seeing Yuri again of seeing Yelena took her back fifteen years. He had watched her grow so much during that time to become an emotionally healthy person, but now he saw the emotionally unstable teenage again. Just as deadly, but at least twice as vulnerable. 

“They’re here,” Clint told them as he watched 3 black SUV’s drive up. From the back of the final one the low-level arms dealer from the surveillance photo emerged. Several other beefy looking thugs emerged from the other vehicles and moved to surround their boss. Clint tensed as they looked right past the window where he was hiding. He knew they wouldn’t spot him, but that didn’t stop him from getting nervous. He squeezed Natasha’s shoulder when he saw Yuri’s group drive up in another caravan. 

Deal seemed to happen as soon as it had begun. The arms dealer talked to Yuri for a few moments then showed him the merchandise in the back of one of the SUVs. Natasha watched as the Yuri laughed and joked around with the men. 

“Давайте пойдём,” Natasha said before spinning around a heading out. Steve understood very little Russian, but he got the basic idea and followed Natasha downstairs. Clint felt a smile creep onto his face when he saw Yuri’s face as he saw Natasha emerge from the building. She walked forward with purpose and her face had gone cold. The cruelty in her smile scared him a little, but he understood it. Steve followed her like a shadow, but he broke off to keep the men from getting to the car and making a quick getaway. 

The recognition that they were about to fight Captain America didn’t register on the men’s faces as they came at Steve. Their faces fell when they saw him throw the first man clean into the van behind him. Once they recognized that they were clearly outmatched, they all ran forward together in hopes of overwhelming Steve. One of the henchmen appeared to get cold feet and tried make a run for it in the complete opposite direction. Clint took care of him.

Steve keenly felt the loss of his shield. Just holding it after the snap had overwhelmed him with emotion but fighting without it felt wrong as well. As the men ran towards him one had the sense to draw his weapon and fire. Steve was forced to duck behind the van into order to shield himself before hopping out to grab at the first man. He noticed the fear in the man’s eyes as he gripped his wrist with one arm and punched his throat with the other. The anger at the world flowed through Steve and the brutality came out in his attacks. Ordinary men pain the price as he used his full force to attack their weakest points. 

Natasha moved slowly and with purpose to bring the drama to the situation. After thirteen years, she wanted Yuri to understand the gravity of the moment. She was going to kill him, and he knew it. Yuri thrived on causing people pain, so he wanted to cause Natalya as much pain as possible. 

“It’s been a long time, little Natalya,” he said in strongly accented English. Natasha started her calculating as the pair started to circle each other like feral animals. Yuri would not be as easy to kill as most of Natasha’s marks. He had been an integral part of her training and understood the Widow style better than most. Although he was not as agile as her, his shear size and strength meant that she would have to be careful. Letting her guard down too much would allow him a lucky hit, but she knew that Clint wouldn’t let that happen. She understood that she wasn’t exactly playing fair, but what did it really matter if she won. 

Yuri pulled two short knives from holsters on his thighs and gripped them tightly in his fists. Natasha recognized them as the same knives that he had used all those years ago when fighting in the Red Room. She felt the small scar on her stomach itch when she remembered how he had stabbed her with the right knife when she was about thirteen years old. Lunging forward, Yuri made the first move in their fight. 

Natasha danced around him to dodge his swings, but his quick movements made attacking almost impossible. She knew that his arms would soon tire, and the pace would slow to give her an opening. She needed a way to attack that did not involve disarming him in any way. He made a tactical error by coming at her with his favorite knives. Although he moved quickly, Natasha proved far more agile at every turn. His only advantage came from his size and strength that he failed to utilize with two knives in his hands. 

All of sudden as if he could read her thoughts, he threw ones of the knives at her. As she dodged the knife, he grabbed onto her hair spinning around her. Pulling her down, he brutally smashed her face into his knee as he raised his leg to meet her. This bolstered his confidence too much as he threw her onto the ground. Seeing this opening as he let go of her hair, she pulled a small knife from up her sleeve and slashed out. She barely missed his Achilles tendon and instead gave him a nasty cut across the ankle. Rolling away she scrambled away from his grip as he tried to grab her by the ankle. She glanced up at the window in hopes that Clint was still watching over her.

“Oh… don’t worry about your little hawk. Yelena will take good care of him,” Yuri breathed. Natasha felt her heart jump into her throat, and she knew that she needed to end this fight quickly. Rising back to her feet, she steadied herself before making her attack. Faster than he could muster a defense, she ran at him and dropped herself to slide under his arms. Spinning around she pulled another knife hidden on her back under her jacket and slashed at Yuri’s legs. This time she hit her mark deep enough that he fell back down onto his knees in pain. He knelt in shock seemingly unsure of what his next move should be. Coming up from behind him, Natasha knocked the remaining knife from his hand and placed her hands on his shoulders. She bent down and gave him a short kiss on the top of his head before dragging her knife across his throat. In that moment, she was not Natasha. Natalya had killed Yuri in the same manner that she had killed so many other men as the Black Widow. Their final kiss before their death only sealed their fate. No man kissed a Black Widow and survived. 

By that point Steve had finished knocking out most of Yuri’s henchmen. As the fight had continued, he felt his anger lessen and he had come back to his senses. Some men groaned on the ground as they started to regain consciousness and others remained still. Steve felt ashamed for the brutality that he had shown. When he already had these men beaten, he kept in the fight just to make someone feel pain. That was not who he was. 

When he looked up from his fight, Steve saw the finish to Natasha and Yuri’s. That was when he saw her, Natalya. Natasha always said that she had been different then, but he could never have imagined just how different. Her eyes did not share the same deadness that they had when she closed off her emotions. They had sparks of life, but a cruel coldness to them. The minute felt as if it passed in slow motion as he watched her approach the kneeling Yuri. She walked like a predator coming in for the kill. He knew he should call out to her before she did something that she would regret, but when he saw her place the kiss on his head, he understood there was nothing to do. In war he had watched many men die, but this was someone that truly enjoyed killing. 

Suddenly a crash caught both of their attentions as they saw Clint’s body tumble out of the window, he had been crouching behind. His back leg caught on a rope tied securely around it and his body jerked to a stop a few feet above the ground. Steve stared in shock as his unconscious friend spun around on the rope to reveal an already bruising face and a deep cut in his arm. Natasha quickly diverted her attention from Clint up towards the window even though she knew exactly what she would find. 

“Hello, Natalya. So good to see you again, little sister,” Yelena Belova called down. To Natasha she appeared barely older than the girl that she had put away all those years ago. No wrinkles on her pale face framed by wavy long blonde hair that tumbled over her shoulders. The only evidence of her fight with Clint that Natasha could see was a slim cut along her check bone under her right eye. Natasha hoped it would scar, but she knew better. 

Steve looked up upon hearing her voice call down to them. He almost expected to see a monstrous looking person instead of the small woman in the window. She looked less of an assassin and more of a ballerina. Her voice kept the slight trace of her accent when she spoke in English, but not enough to notice without looking for it. He searched for a sign besides the cut on her face to show that Clint put up a good fight, but her black shirt and pants covered her almost entirely. 

“I’m not Natalya any longer,” Natasha called.

“Are you sure about that? Pity though, I don’t know Natasha Romanoff,” Yelena said. 

“I left Natalya behind a long time ago.”

“Oh, I believe you. You’re an entirely new person now. So incredible that you can fight aliens but let us see if your past will be your reckoning,” Yelena said her tone darkening.

“Are you scared, Natalya?” Yelena questioned after a moment of silence.

“Why would I be scared of you?” Natasha fired back. 

“Because I’m going to take away your precious archer, just like I took away your Winter Soldier all those years ago.” Natasha stiffened. Steve’s grim expression changed to pure shock.

“You might be playing with us right now, but you won’t win.”

“Last time you had the entirety of Shield at your disposal and you could barely take me. What makes you think you will win when you are alone?”

“And you had the Red Room last time,” Natasha countered.

“Oh Natalya,” Yelena replied shaking her head. She gave Natasha was appeared to be almost a genuinely sad smile before disappearing back into the room. 

Once Yelena disappeared, Natasha rushed forward with her knife to try and cut Clint down. She called for Steve to come help her because she needed someone to catch him. Steve put aside his thoughts for a moment to hold Clint’s body as Natasha jumped up to cut the rope. 

“What did she mean when she said she took your Winter Soldier?” Steve asked breaking the tension. This was the moment that Natasha had been trying to avoid ever since the first day that she had met Captain America. Cradling Clint in his arms, Steve followed Natasha as she turned and walked away from the question. Steve noticed she had taken a handgun from one of Clint’s holsters.

“We don’t have time for that now. We have to get back to the safehouse and make sure that Clint is okay. Go put him in the car I have some things to take care of” she called over her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” At that moment he realized what she was about to do. He wished that he wasn’t holding Clint in his arms or he could have run to stop her. Natasha arrived at the unconscious body of the closest of Yuri’s men. One bullet to the head. 

“It needed to be done,” Natasha stated like a fact. 

“They’re already down, Tasha,” Steve pleaded. He used Tasha to try and coax the humanity back into his friend. At this moment he hardly recognized her.

“I don’t do this and tomorrow you’re going to be wasting time beating the shit out of the same guys. No, this needs to happen,” she said eliminating two more.

“This isn’t how we operate, and you know it,” Steve yelled with some anger rising in his voice. 

“How we operate? No, this is exactly how we operate. What do you think Clint and I do? What do you think our job description is? It certainly isn’t knock bad guys unconscious all day long. We kill people, Steve. I know that doesn’t fit with the beautiful idyllic picture of us Captain America had built in his head. But this is who we are, and this is exactly what we do,” Natasha lectured. 

“Maybe Yelena is right. Maybe you are Natalya still.” Steve went for the most personal blow that he could think of in the moment. He saw from Natasha’s sharp look at him that the jab had done its job at waking her up a little at least. 

“Maybe you’re right, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Natalya is a survivor.”

Natasha quickly started back to the car leaving Steve in her wake. Jogging, Steve got back to the car they had arrived in and carefully laid Clint down across the back seat. Up closer they were able to see that Yelena had gotten him with some kind of sleeping dart that explained the lack of consciousness. Once Natasha found that, she became noticeably less tense because it meant she hadn’t actually injured him too badly. This whole day had been orchestrated to send them a message, not to kill anyone.

The car ride passed without any talking between the pair. Both anxiously kept an eye on Clint for the slightest sign of moment coming from the back seat. Without knowing the dosage or even what the dart contained they had no way of knowing when he would wake up. He appeared to sleep peacefully without pain, which eased Natasha’s mind. For Steve the car ride allowed him time to think over everything that had happened that morning. Nothing could have prepared him. Mostly his mind kept replaying Yelena’s words over and over again. She had taken away Natasha’s Winter Soldier, but did that mean Bucky. He knew that there had been plans for other Soldiers like him, but they had never come to fruition.

When they returned to the safehouse Steve supported Clint and dragged him along to make it appear to passersby that he was helping a drunk friend home. Although that seemed unusual for 10 in the morning, it was better than carrying an unconscious fully-grown man. Natasha ditched the car somewhere and appeared in the safehouse a quarter of an hour later. Steve by that time had laid Clint out on the couch in the living area of the studio apartment they all had been sharing. On the other hand, he had taken up residence at the dining room table directly in front of the small kitchen. 

“How is he doing?” Natasha asked as soon as she came inside. She rushed over to check on her friend. She checked his temperature with the back of hand on his forehead and felt for his pulse to ensure it wasn’t unusually fast. 

“What did she mean by Winter Soldier?” Steve said defeated. He knew that Natasha would probably brush off his question or give him an angry response, but he had to ask. She knew that. This time she realized that the truth was going to come out whether she wanted it to or not. She knew that she had been treading a delicate line by getting Steve involved with Yelena without telling him the full story. She just didn’t realize he would find out so quickly. 

“She meant Bucky…” Natasha breathed. The sound came out so quietly Steve almost thought he must have misheard, but what else would she have said. She stood staring down at her toes with her arms crossed almost as if in shame. 

“You knew him?” Steve asked. Steve felt the sense of betrayal boiling inside of him along with the anger he’d been trying so very hard to suppress. Natasha glanced up to meet his eyes and gave him a small nod. Steve didn’t know how to react. He had accepted that there would always be things that he didn’t know about her, but this was too much. She knew that Bucky had been his lifelong friend, his best friend. She knew from the moment the Winter Solider came after them in DC that it was his friend chasing them, but she said nothing. 

“There was never a good time,” she stammered. 

“We’ve known each other for years, Natasha. There were many, many good times,” Steve retorted. Natasha opened her mouth to reply, but quickly closed it when they heard movement from the couch. Clint started to open his eyes and brought his hand up to his head. 

“Tasha,” he breathed. Forgetting about Steve completely, Natasha rushed over and knelt down beside her friend. She took his hand in hers and held it close to her heart. Steve felt out of place as if he was seeing some too intimate for him to be there. He saw such tenderness in the way that Natasha held him close to her now and the way they had been together in Japan. To be fair, until the team met Clint’s family during the Ultron debacle, they had all assumed that Clint and Natasha were much “closer” than they let on. 

“How’s your head?” Natasha asked. She dropped his hand and instead grabbed his face to look into his eyes to check for any problems. 

“Feels like the worst hangover I’ve ever had. So how much did I miss?” Clint responded in good spirits. 

“Turns out Natasha actually knows the Winter Soldier quite well,” Steve snapped, inserting himself into the conversation. Clint groaned and pulled away from Natasha.

“A simple ‘a lot’ would’ve been the answer to that question. I missed a lot.”

“I’m guessing you knew about this,” Steve accused. 

“Of course, he knew about this. Now is not the time, Steve,” Natasha warned. Steve threw up his hands in outrage. 

“Then when is the time, Natasha?”

“Hey Clint, how’s the head feel? Glad you’re awake now and not dead. Thanks for taking out that one guy that slipped past me,” Clint spoke in the background. 

“Clint, shut up!” Steve yelled. 

“I’m going up to the roof for a while. I can’t deal with this right now. Clint talk some sense into him,” Natasha said exasperated. She gave Clint one last reassuring squeeze on the shoulder before leaving the apartment out the window onto the fire escape going up. Steve moved to follow her but realized better of it. He knew he needed to calm down, but all the recent emotions swirling around in his head made him crazy. All he wanted was a little peace. 

He sank down into the chair across from the couch and stared at Clint. Clint looked back at him with an unimpressed expression before grimacing and rubbing his temples. He had hoped that everyone would be in a semi cheerful mood when he woke up. He actually felt glad to have woken up at all after having Yelena stab him with something. The last thing he remembered was her wicked vengeful eyes staring down at him as he blacked out. He thought he might have been dying, but he figured Yelena would want to make him death hurt a lot more and last a lot longer. His children’s faces had flashed across his mind, but the last thing he saw was Tasha. 

“Do you even get headaches anymore?” Clint asked after a minute of silence.

“Not since 1942. Can’t say I miss them,” Steve admitted. He thought back for a moment to all of the health problems he had before the serum. He should’ve died a hundred times of a hundred different things when he was growing up, but somehow, he had survived. He still felt glad everyday for being able to simply breathe properly after a life growing up with asthma.

“Lucky bastard.”

“Well everyone I ever knew is dead, so it’s a certainly a tradeoff.”

“I mean my entire family is dead, so same boat there. At least you don’t get headaches,” Clint shrugged. Steve couldn’t help but laugh a little. He supposed humor had always been the only way to survive situations like this. 

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Steve asked, bringing the conversation back to a more serious note. 

“When would she have? You were always friendly, but you weren’t really friends until Shield fell and you went on the run together. I suppose that would’ve been the time, but then again, you’d probably still have been just as angry. I can’t give you the exact reason that she didn’t tell you. Natasha keeps her life to herself more than anyone else I’ve ever known,” Clint tried to explain. 

“Coming from the man with a secret family,” Steve quipped. Clint gave a small laugh.

“Okay you make a good point there. But Natasha wasn’t raised like you…or even me. She never had any sort of familial support or normal friendships. The girls in the Red Room competed against each other since they were five and six years old. The effects of a lifetime of abuse don’t just vanish the moment that you make a new friend; they stay with you forever. Believe it or not, Natasha has gotten wayyyy more open since I first met her.” Clint thought back to the start of their friendship. How long it had taken him to gain her trust, truly gain it. How terrified she had been every moment of her childhood without ever realizing it. Steve understood the angle that Clint was coming from. Growing up he had had a mother to take care of him and Bucky for him to confide in. He didn’t know how he would have ever survived without Bucky, especially after his mother died. 

“What was she like when you first met her?” Steve asked out of curiosity. He knew only what he had read in the Shield files that Natasha had released to the public, but they didn’t tell much except for her long list of completed missions. 

“If I had to pick one word for our first meeting it would be…feral,” Clint said after a moment. He smiled remembering it fondly. Steve leaned back and listened as he heard Clint start to recount a story that he’d always wanted to hear. 


	9. Chapter Nine

Clint stared down through the scope as he watched the infamous Black Widow stroll down the streets of Prague towards her hotel. The first thing that caught his eye when he spotted her was how young she looked. He knew from the intel gathered by Shield that she would be somewhere in her early to mid-twenties, but this girl looked younger. A shiver went down his spine as he thought back to the list of confirmed kills that Coulson had shown him before taking the mission. I want you to know what you’re getting into, he’d said. Clint never shied away from a challenge though. 

He’d been watching her most of the day from a distance while reporting back to Coulson every couple of hours. He was fairly sure that she hadn’t spotted him, mostly because he’d always been a couple of rooftops away or hidden in his hotel room. Safely tucked away in his perch, he doubted she ever thought to look up enough to notice him. 

After a late-night meeting with a contact, the Black Widow headed back to her hotel room to get a good night’s sleep before the long day of killing ahead of her. Clint’s orders called for him to take her out in her hotel room that night or the next morning. Although he had better vantage points when she walked openly through the streets, Shield didn’t want the possible fallout from a public assassination of one of an enemy country’s top operatives. Russia would of course know exactly what happened, but if they could keep it out of the newspapers that would be ideal. 

Doubtless someone would hear the gunshot from the rifle, but Shield could always rely on the famous Hawkeye to use a quieter weapon. They couldn’t take the chance of sending someone to kill her actually inside her hotel room. She would massacre any person that even came close to her, so they sent Clint. He worked better from a distance. 

He expected her to keep her windows tightly closed once she entered her hotel room on the tenth floor, but she didn’t. Instead she stood directly in front of the open window in her pajamas and stared up at the stars coming out in the sky. He lined up the shot, but something kept him from releasing the arrow. Once his thoughts came back into focus, she had moved away from the window and started to get ready for bed.

Once she laid down in bed, he would have the perfect easy shot to take her out. So simple. He watched her carefully pull back the sheets and climb into the bed. Suddenly his heart jumped into his chest. She pulled a pair of handcuffs out from a bag sitting on the nightstand and gently cuffed her arm to the headboard. He put down the bow. 

“She’s in for the night. The room is closed tight, so we’ll have to try again in the morning,” Clint reported to Coulson. 

“Damn. Don’t worry. We’ll get her.” That night Clint saw that moment play over and over again in his mind. The infamous Black Widow was a prisoner. A tool to be used by her superiors. Clint knew how that felt. 

He made another excuse the next morning when Coulson called to check in again. He couldn’t get the thoughts out of his mind that she could be helped. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that she was innocent in all this, but how could the blame fall entirely on her shoulders. He may have made his excuses in the morning, but the time for this mission was running out. 

“She’s on the move. She should be heading out the back door in less than a minute. Be ready,” Coulson warned from inside the hotel. Only a few minutes earlier, the Black Widow had been upstairs with a very wealthy businessman with ties to Russian organized crime. Coulson had been on the watch inside the bar and ordered Clint to keep an eye out in skies. As fate would have it, her and her target had entered a hotel room with an open window. 

She had romanced the businessman at the hotel bar all night with enchanting stories of false adventures. At least that’s what the paid off bartender told Coulson when he asked. They didn’t dare send a man into the room with her because she would know immediately and flee. Once the sun went down and the businessman drank, he started to get more and more handsy. He fell into her trap quiet easily, as all men did. They soon found themselves upstairs in the businessman’s suite when the tone of the evening changed. From his vantage point, Clint saw through the window as she kissed the man on the head and then slit his throat. Yet he still did not take the shot. He told Coulson that he couldn’t find a good angle, but it seemed time had run out. 

She burst out one of the back doors into an alleyway. Clint knew that he couldn’t just let her vanish again, so he did what needed to be done. He took the shot and his aim was perfect as ever. He hit her right through her left thigh. Then doing the most stupid thing anyone could imagine, he started to quickly climb down from the rooftop to chase her. 

She moved a lot fast than he would have imagined for someone that had just been shot in the leg. He finally caught up with her a few streets over as she ducked into another alleyway clutching her leg. Glancing around the corner, he saw her hobbling to the end where a dumpster might give her cover. She turned back and fired a small handgun at him trying to cover herself, firing quickly out of desperation. He counted her shots carefully and rounded the corner into the alleyway. He approached the dumpster carefully with his handgun ready. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he told her. 

“Вы врете,” she muttered. As he had expected she lunged at him as soon as he rounded the corner towards her. Throwing her own useless handgun to distract him, she reached for his, but he pulled it away faster than she could reach. Most of the color had drained from her face, and he could tell that the wound was taking its toll. She had kept the arrow in the leg, but she still lost a good amount of blood. She attacked him again in full force, but she did not have the strength to move away fast enough. She bit down so as to not cry out when Clint landed a well-aimed kick on her injured thigh snapping the end of the arrow with it. Staggering away while almost dragging her leg, she could hardly move from the pain. 

“Меня зовут Клинт. Я хочу помочь вам,” he said slowly. He had been practicing how to say he wanted to help all day, but he knew his pronunciation must have been horrible. Her eyes stared as him warily as she backed herself as far as possible into the brick wall behind her. 

“Did you get her?” he heard from Coulson in his ear. Ignoring his handler’s question, he advanced towards her slowly. At this point she was like any cornered animal, and not to be underestimated. For that reason, he kept his gun aimed at her as he spoke to her. 

“Just kill me and get it over with,” she snarled. 

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“You can torture me for information all you want. I wouldn’t help you,” she said backing herself into the corner between the dumpster and the wall. At this point she needed the corner for support because she could barely stand. 

“I only want to help you. I’ll prove it to you. I’m putting my gun down,” he said, making perhaps what some would call the dumbest decision of all time. 

“I better not be hearing that right, Barton,” he heard Coulson yell in his ear. Clint pulled the transmitter from his ear and threw it on the ground before slowly laying his gun on the ground in front of the Black Widow. He held his hands out by his sides to make sure that she didn’t think he was trying to trick her. 

“If you come with me now, I promise I will protect you. I promise that I am going to help you. I promise to give you a home again,” he said holding his outstretched hand to her. He waited for what felt like an eternity. He knew that she probably did not believe him, and why would she. But he hoped that she would take this chance. He froze when he saw her start to move, not know if she was about to try to kill him again. But then she gingerly reached forward to take his hand. Something inside her told her that he was telling the truth, but she didn’t know what.

At that moment as she held his hand, her leg started to give out on her, and she fell forward without the support of the wall. He moved to catch her, but her instincts kicked in and she pushed him away slightly. She stepped back towards the wall again and slid down it into a sitting position. From there she slipped her belt off her pants and started to wrap it around her thigh. She knew that she couldn’t afford to lose much more blood if she wanted to survive. 

“Sorry about the leg. It was the only way that I stood a chance in hell at catching you,” he said trying to add some levity to the situation. He actually thought he might have seen a twinge of a smile cross her tired face. 

“You’re a good shot,” she replied. Clint was about to reply when a dry-cleaning van pulled up and slammed to a stop at the edge of the alley. Coulson rolled down the window to the passenger’s side window to yell at Clint. 

“We need a hospital,” he yelled at Coulson. He knew that he would be in for the argument of a lifetime, but at the moment he only cared about making sure the Black Widow was safe. 

“Get in the van,” Coulson roared back. He understood that it would be of no use to argue with Clint at the time, but it didn’t stop him from prepping his argument in his head. Fury would have his neck for letting this happen. 

Reaching out his hand, Clint took her dainty hand in his and pulled her back to her feet. Looping his arm around her frame, he supported her as she hobbled along on one leg. He noticed how she slightly grimaced each time her foot hit the ground, but also how she hid her pain so well. Together they limped her along into the back of the van and then Clint pulled the doors shut behind them. As much as he hated to damage this newfound trust, Clint understood that Shield would never let the Black Widow into one of their facilities, even a hospital, while awake. 

“I promise you’ll wake up in the hospital,” Clint told her. He jabbed her with a sleeping dart before she could move away. He held her head as she faded off to sleep with a hurt expression on her face that made his heart break. 


	10. Chapter Ten

“You saw her kill that man so brutally so needlessly cruelly. What made you want to save her?” Steve asked. When he had seen Natasha kill Yuri in the same way he had been horrified. How had Clint seen that and still seen the good in someone. 

“She killed Yuri like that didn’t she?” he asked in reply. Clint had watched Steve’s face contort when he mentioned the killing of the businessman. Steve now only nodded. 

“The handcuffs. My mind was made up as soon as I saw her chain herself to that bed,” Clint stated. The tone of his voice left no room for Steve to question him. 

“Another quick question. How in the hell did she not kill you when she woke up in the hospital? She must have been pissed,” Steve said smiling. 

“That’s a very good question. That is definitely something that you’ll have to ask her because I have no clue. I fully expected to have her attack me as soon as she regained consciousness. Although the pain meds they put her on might have had something to do with it,” Clint shrugged. 

Steve had trouble believing that the pain meds would have stopped her, but anything was possible. He did wonder how Natasha had trusted Clint to save her in that alleyway. What could have possibly made her take his hand? What he did know, was that Clint had watched her do terrible things and still held his hand out to her. More than anything he didn’t feel angry at her for not telling him about her past, about Bucky. He felt sad that they didn’t have the trust that he thought they did, but that trust comes with a certain understanding. She knew all along that he had always judged her for some of the things she had done. He’d judged her for keeping Fury’s secrets from him. For messing with Bruce. Clint never held any of that against her. 

“Did you know what Natasha was doing to Bruce?” The question popped out of Steve as soon as it crossed his mind. He had all these questions swirling around in his head and now he finally had someone that might be able to answer them. 

“I mean she never came right out and told me, but yes I saw what she was doing to him,” Clint said almost guiltily. This was something he hadn’t thought about in a long time, but he guessed that seeing Bruce again had brought it all back up again for Steve and Natasha. He knew he should’ve stepped in at the time and told Natasha to take a step back, but he had a habit of just letting things slide when it came to her. 

“She said it was because we needed the Hulk, not Banner and she delivered that,” Steve said repeating what she had told him.

“Before the battle of New York, Hulk almost killed her on that Helicarrier. I’ve never seen her more terrified in her life. We’ve both watched her fight aliens and robots without even batting an eye, but that experience scared her. You’ll never understand what it means to be a normal human going up against the Hulk. I wouldn’t say that she did it to deliver the Hulk, but she did it to control him. She calmed him down so that he came back to being Banner. Yes, she did manipulate him, but so that she would feel safe. Feeling safe is not something that is easy to come by in our world. I will admit that she might have gone too far by starting to almost romance him.” 

Natasha listened outside the window as Clint talked to Steve. Hearing him talk about the day that they first met made her smile. She thought about how far she had come since that day and how much she had changed. She had been so young when it all happened. Feeling that the mood was right again, Natasha slipped back into the apartment through the window. 

“How did Yelena seem?” Natasha asked to change the subject. They had talked about her enough for one day.

“Oh, we had a great chat. I think she’s in amazing spirits considering the years in prison,” Clint replied. 

“You know what I mean.”

“Oh, yeah somebody fucked up bigtime. Because someone that has been in solitary confinement for that long shouldn’t still have those reflexes. She’s been sparing with someone.” Natasha cursed under her breath. She had at least hoped that Yelena would be weaker than the last time. 

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. I know I’m not as good as you, Tasha, but that doesn’t mean that I can be taken down by someone half my size and ten years out of practice,” he reminded her. 

“Did she say anything to you?”

“She said it was nice to see me again. I told her that it wasn’t so nice to see her. She used вы. I used ты, so I think I pissed her off.” Steve heard their statement and realized that he had no idea why that would have been offensive. He realized he would probably need to learn a little Russian before this whole thing was over. 

“Oh, I’m sure your over familiarity got under her skin,” Natasha said sarcastically. 

“Nah, I’m pretty sure she just thinks I’m too stupid to know what I said,” Clint quipped with a self-satisfied smile. At that Natasha gave him a playful smile and rolled her eyes. 

“Okay, so I’m very lost now,” Steve said hoping for clarification. He likened the feeling to everyone sharing an inside joke that he wasn’t apart of. 

“Russian has a formal and an informal you. Yelena used the formal you when addressing Clint because she doesn’t know him well, but Clint used the informal to be rude. Many Americans that learn the language don’t know the difference, so they end up accidentally offending people,” Natasha explained. 

“Early on Natasha made sure that I knew the difference,” Clint laughed. 

“So, did she make any reference to where she was going next?” Natasha asked pulling the conversation back to Yelena. She wanted to know exactly what happened while everything was still fresh in Clint’s mind.

“She said that your past would finally come back to haunt you. Your whole past…” Clint paused and moved around a little as if uncomfortable. “She said that Natalya will pay for what she has done. She said that you and I will pay for Ekaterina…” His words hung in the air bringing tension back to the room. Steve just shook his head at hearing another name he didn’t know. He was pretty sure that if he asked Natasha about her, she would bite his head off after everything that happened. He didn’t know how many more fights they could take in one day. He still had so many questions about Bucky and Yelena, but now he had to add the mysterious Ekaterina to the mix. 

“So, she’s teasing Kiev?” Natasha said questioningly to Clint.

“It would seem that’s where she wants us to go. I don’t like the idea of walking into yet another trap. We need to be smarter than this,” Clint urged her. He knew that not going to Kiev would have consequences but going could end up with one of them getting killed. Yelena was unlikely to let them leave unharmed again. Yelena would string Natasha along as long as she could making her relive her worst memories, but at some point, Clint and Steve would be unnecessary baggage. He wouldn’t let Natasha go alone, but if he could convince her to stay away that would be better.

“Today she had you kill Yuri. Who else from the Red Room is still alive that she can throw at you?” Steve asked. He assumed that they had embarked on a scavenger hunt of sorts that followed Natasha’s history. He also assumed that each stop would have someone like Yuri to confront.

“I don’t know. After Yelena was captured, the Red Room kind of collapsed. And now half of the ones left alive got snapped a few weeks ago. I don’t know how Yelena managed to find anyone with only being free for a few weeks.” Natasha sat at a loss for what to do. Yelena had teased Kiev so something would definitely happen there, but why bother playing the game when you know how it ends.

“Is there anything about Ekaterina that could at least hint at what she has planned for you?” Steve said trying to prompt her. Natasha thought back to all those years ago when she and Clint has confronted little Katya. Shield wanted her target alive, so they had kept him alive. The Red Room did not tolerate failure, and little Katya paid the price. 

“Would she go after Renz?” Natasha stiffened when she heard Clint say his name.

“Renz was put into protective custody by Shield. She would have no way of finding him without having access to those files,” Natasha said brushing it off. 

“Files that you might have dumped on the internet to expose Hydra within Shield,” Steve said thinking out loud.

“We have to go to Florida.” Within moments the apartment erupted in a flurry of motion as Natasha started to shove her belongings in her bag. Clint pushed himself up off the couch and motioned for Steve to do the same. Not even thirty minutes later, the group exited the building to find a car that could take them to the quinjet that they had left in some woods about an hour outside the city. 

The streets were empty outside except for a young woman standing directly across the road from them. She stood completely still with her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket and her long brown hair blowing in the breeze. Steve could only describe it as eerie. Natasha emerged from the building last and therefore was the last to spot the woman. Her eyes widened and she immediately took on in a dead sprint across the street dropping her bag on the sidewalk. 

Swirling around the woman darted down the street staying well ahead of Natasha. Clint pulled his backpack onto both arms and started off after the women. Steve took a moment to pick up Natasha’s abandoned bag before chasing off and catching up with Clint. The girl had reached the end of the street and headed towards the left. The gap between the groups started to close as they all sprinted right down the middle of the empty road after her. 

All of a sudden, she sharply turned right into an alleyway. Natasha nearly caught ahold of her coat flapping behind her, but the girl just dodged her. Once Natasha saw the alleyway, she immediately forgot about chasing the girl and just stared in horror at the sight in front of her. The girl used this time advantage to reach the end of alley and disappear beyond. After a few seconds, Steve and Clint reached the alley and Clint almost collided with Natasha not realizing she had stopped. 

Steve recognized the kindly looking old man that had given them the thumb drive in Moscow. His body had been strung up against the brick wall with his shirt stripped from his body. Across his chest a single word had been carved “предатель”. His hands were covered in bruises from where he had clearly tried to fight off his attackers, but what chance had the old man had. Natasha could do nothing more than stare at the body directly in front of her. She knew that using her old sources would be risky, but she never imagined that Yelena would do this. He had not part in their fight, but he had been an innocent bystander. No exactly innocent she reminded herself, but not involved in their fight. He had not deserved this. 

“Вы были не предателем,” Natasha whispered. She had approached the body and stood touching the words carved into his chest. Clint wanted to comfort her in some way, but he could only think about how much they needed to leave. They couldn’t be spotted near the dead body of an old intelligence officer, especially one with the word traitor carved into his chest. 

“Tasha, we need to go,” he said reaching out to touch her arm. She flinched away from his touch and continued to stare at the body. The old man had been an intelligence officer that occasionally gave assignments to the Red Room. A political enemy on Ivan, he had disagreed with the manner in which the Red Room was being run. After Natasha and Yelena were gone, he was instrumental in the destruction of the Red Room. Ivan could no longer tout his favorite girls as the pride of Russia and the program proved too deeply flawed. Natasha would forever be in his debt for this. He would never have betrayed his country to Shield, he loved his country too much for that. He loved her so dearly that he had been able to see her flaws and tried to correct them. As she thought back to how he had helped her, she saw more and more why Yelena had killed him. 

“Нам надо уехать во Флориду. Сейчас.” Clint switched the Russian hoping that it would register with her more. After a moment, she nodded and turned away from the body. She nodded in thanks as Steve handed her backpack, unsure of what else to do. Clint gingerly took her hand and when she didn’t pull away, he squeezed it reassuringly. The trio exited the alleyway and left the body hanging there to be found my police later. Steve hotwired the first car that they came across parked on the side of the road. 

Steve had spent the entire time with Natasha and Clint being completely confused about what was going on. As he drove the car into country from the city, the image of the body in the alleyway stayed fresh in his mind. He may not understand who everyone was or how they all fit into this twisted story, but he did understand what kind of person they were going up against. Yelena had been toying with them before when she only knocked Clint unconscious. Next time it could be one of them tortured and left like trash in an alley. 

He found himself thinking of Bucky and how he had apparently worked with the Red Room when Natasha was young. What had he been like when he was there? Steve knew that with his brainwashing he could be ordered to do almost anything, but mostly to Steve’s knowledge that had been simple quick assassinations. But after seeing the alley, he knew that Bucky could have done much worse. 

He glanced in the rearview mirror to check on Natasha because she hadn’t spoken at all since, they had left the city. Their bags sat piled in the front seat next to Steve with Clint and Natasha sitting together in the back. Natasha stared blankly out the window with her hand firmly gripping Clint’s. Clint kept a close eye and kept giving her hand small squeezes. 

“The girl in the street was just fifteen when I last saw her. Lydia. She and little Katya were best friends. I never knew what became of her. She disappeared after…” Natasha started to say. She looked so lost within her own thoughts, but she felt like she needed to tell them. Clint would have heard about Lida before, but not in many, many years. Neither Clint nor Steve dared to start speaking for fear that Natasha would retreat back into her head. 

“Clint was there so he knows what happened to Katya, but you don’t Steve. It happened on the first non-recon mission that Shield allowed me to go on. If I took a step out of line, Clint was ordered to shoot me. They told us that a German journalist was in grave danger and had uncovered some evidence of corruption in the US embassy and Shield needed that evidence. We were ordered to travel to Kiev where the journalist, Tomas Renz, was giving a guest lecture at the university. What they didn’t tell us, or me at least, was that the Red Room had been tasked to get rid of Renz.

An easy target without many connections so they would send one of the greener girls to handle it. He would have been good practice, but Clint and I were there. Of all the people in the world, Steve, you might understand what that mission had been like for me. To stare down someone that you grew up with and realize that you might have to kill them.” Steve felt his heart go out to Natasha in that moment. He remembered exactly how it had been to see Bucky standing across from him. He wanted so badly not to hurt him, but he also had to defend himself and the innocent bystanders. He understood the reasoning behind Shield sending her on a mission like that, but it still seemed cruel. Natasha kept speaking for the rest of the car ride about what had happened those years ago. 


	11. Chapter Eleven

Natasha had been growing restless in the six months that she had been at Shield. First there had been the physical therapy and then the recon missions, but now she had the chance to show her skills. She knew the assignment would be simple, just a test to see how well she would actually work with Clint in the field. They wanted to make sure as soon as they turned her loose, she wouldn’t turn around and run. She understood and didn’t blame them. She wouldn’t have trusted someone like her either. 

Landing in Kiev, she had heard people all around her speaking Russian or Ukrainian, and her mind breathed a sigh of relief. Although she had been taught English since she was a small child, her thoughts remained in Russian. Every night in her dreams she returned home and even the ones with Clint had him speaking Russian. Hearing it again in the real world made her feel more comfortable and relaxed. This was her world. 

“We’ve been sent by Shield to escort you back to the US, Mr. Renz,” Clint informed the journalist standing across the room. From the airport, the duo had taken the car waiting for the them directly to the university. Against Shield’s advice, the journalist had maintained that he still wanted to give his lecture before leaving. Originally, they had been assigned to meet him at his hotel, but they knew that his trip from the university to the hotel would be too risky for him to go alone. Especially since Shield hadn’t given them any idea of who specifically would be coming after him. They had only said some members from Ukrainian organized crime. 

“Yes, and I will gladly leave after I give my lecture. I haven’t even gone public with my story yet, so I don’t see how I am in any danger as this time,” Renz told them. Idiot, Natasha thought. He unrooted this corruption by asking the right questions, and those questions always get back to someone. Even if he doesn’t know it. Still a room full of college students would probably not be the best place for an attack, too many witnesses. Plus, a public assassination always got people asking questions, but an apparent suicide or drug overdose shut questions down. 

Clint decided to sit in on the lecture just in case something happened, and Natasha would check the route from the university to the hotel. She wanted to get a feel for the roads and which side routes they could take just in case they needed. She had reviewed the maps on the plane ride over, but nothing compared to actually being down on the ground. She spotted roads closed for road work and where the busy sections were, invaluable intel. Her review brought her back to the university a few minutes before the lecture finished. 

She walked into the lecture hall to find Clint sitting in the back row. The lecture had just finished, and students were lining up at the front to ask any last-minute questions they would have. Renz seemed perfectly in his element and eagerly greeted everyone that came up to him. Natasha thought nothing of it until she started to look over the students waiting in the line. A young blonde girl waited patiently with her books clasped tightly against her chest. The last in line she would probably have been the last one in the lecture hall with him had it not been for Clint and Natasha. The girl glanced back and made eye contact with Natasha. Ekaterina. 

Natasha leapt in action and sprinted down the stairs of the auditorium. Katya’s eyes went wide, and her books dropped to the floor. She pushed past the people in the line to try and get to Renz before Natasha got to her. She pulled a knife out of her jacket and lunged towards the frightened journalist. He had seen Natasha move and knew he should probably take cover, but he couldn’t manage to move. He was only saved by the other students that bravely tried to knock the knife out of Katya’s hand. One boy grabbed her arm just in time, but she twisted away and gave him a cut right across his cheek. Then the screaming started. 

Clint started down the stairs and followed Natasha with the goal of getting the other students out of the room. He cursed himself for not noticing the girl before, but he had no way of recognizing her. He never should have allowed the lecture to happen and he certainly should not have been sitting so far from Renz. Natasha made it to Katya before she could take another lunge at Renz and she grabbed out at the younger girl’s hair. Using all of her strength, Natasha slammed the girl to the ground by her hair and sent her sliding into the huge podium that Renz stood behind. The other students rushed to move out of the way of the two girls right. Clint started to pull the students away from the fight and push them towards the door closest to them in the front of the lecture hall. 

“Ты не должна быть здесь, сестра,” Katya said out of breath as she scrambled back to her feet. 

“Я не хочу убить тебя, младщая сестра,” Natasha told her. Natasha was telling the truth even if Katya didn’t believe her. She really did not want to kill one of her sisters, especially not Katya. 

The two girls circled each other keeping eye contact. They each waited for the other to make the first move. Katya waited because she knew Natasha was better than her, but Natasha waited because she really did not want to hurt Katya. They each ignored the chaos and the screaming that Clint was trying to contain around them. He had managed to send the students in the right direction and now he rushed back to pull Renz out of the room. That sparked Katya into action when she saw her mission slipping away.

She turned her back to Natasha and instead went for Renz. She vaulted herself over the podium to be standing face to face with Renz. One good hit would end it, but Clint reached around Renz to grab her right arm with the knife. She twisted out of his grip and was about to strike again when Natasha jumped behind her and pulled her backwards. Katya shoved her elbow back into Natasha’s stomach causing her to double over slightly. She then flipped the knife in her hand stabbed backwards catching Natasha across her right side. 

Natasha’s training had always taught her that she could not stop even if she was injured. The cut never stopped her for a second as she pulled Katya’s hair again. She knew Katya had been stupid to leave it down like this and it could so easily be used against her. Clint had taken the few seconds Natasha bought him to place himself in front of Renz. Katya was being pulled back and Clint advanced forward to go for her knife. He just barely caught her hand and used his other hand to slam down on her arm as hard as he could to make her drop the knife. It worked.

Natasha used her grip on her hair to throw Katya into the back wall of the classroom. Katya crouched against the wall and surveyed the room in front of her. Her target stood behind two deadly well-trained assassins. She didn’t stand much of a chance. But the girls in the Red Room were taught not to stop, so she advanced forward again. This time she decided to try and bypass the pair in front of her by running to jump over the podium directly in front of her. At least she knew that Clint would be too far to the right to catch her and she might be able to get to Renz on the other side before them. 

Her luck ran out as Natasha caught her foot as she tried jumping over the podium. She slammed down on her stomach and kicked out. Her foot connected with Natasha’s head and caused her to let go. That had slowed her down enough that Clint had managed to get to the other side of the podium as stand between her and her target. She proved faster than the archer and was able to land a few good hits while dodging some of his. When faced with a completely open auditorium behind him, Renz finally regained the strength to move and started to run. He started up the stairs to try and make it to the back door in the room.

Katya caught him in her eye and tried to slip under Clint’s arms and get behind him. Clint caught the back of her shirt and kept her from getting too far. Then Natasha rejoined the fight and sent a few blows at Katya’s face. Natasha tried not to hurt Katya, otherwise she would have ended this fight a long time ago. 

“Let me have him, sister,” Katya pleaded breathing heavily. 

“You know I can’t do that,” Natasha answered. She realized that nothing would make Katya stop. 

“Hawkeye, get Renz,” Natasha told him. With a nod, Clint left the fight to go racing up the stairs. He knew that Natasha would end things now. 

Katya lunged out to try and kick Natasha in the stomach, but Natasha was faster, and she caught Katya’s leg. She twisted it causing Katya to lose her balance. She advanced and grabbed Katya’s head as she tried to regain her balance. Her told her little sister sorry as she slammed her head down against a desk in front of them. From there Katya staggered away in pain clutching her head, when Natasha set a well-aimed kick into the side of head leaving the younger girl unconscious on floor. Seeing no movement in the girl, Natasha ran outside to find Clint.


	12. Chapter Twelve

“What happened to Ekaterina?” Steve asked after Natasha stopped speaking. He saw in the rearview mirror as Natasha grimaced and looked out the window. 

“First the police found her unconscious on the floor of the classroom. She escaped custody, but her face was already all over the TV with people trying to identify her. When she went back to the Red Room, they made Lida kill her. I should have just killed her in Kiev, at least it would have been a quick death.” Natasha remembered when Yelena had screamed that at her all those years ago. That she had failed her sisters. That she knew what would happen to Katya and didn’t care. That she had been selfish and Lida had paid the price. Yelena had told her that as the eldest they were always supposed to look after the other girls, but instead Natasha had betrayed them all. As much as she wanted to say it wasn’t true, she knew Yelena had been telling the truth. 

“Her death isn’t your fault, but all the same I’m sorry that happened to you. That’s some bad luck getting that as your first mission,” Steve said attempting to lighten the mood. Natasha just shook her head in response. 

“It wasn’t bad luck. Shield knew that the Red Room was sending someone after Renz, so they sent Tasha for a loyalty test,” Clint answered for her. 

“Don’t worry I failed both sides that day. Shield also wanted me to kill her,” Natasha added. 

“That’s bullshit. I understand why you couldn’t. I’m sorry, Tasha,” Steve told her. All the anger that he had been feeling towards Natasha recently had started to melt away. As she opened up more and shared, he felt closer to her than ever. He felt like he had his friend back and in these difficult times he truly needed all the friends he could get. 

“There have only been three times in my life that I have frozen like that. I guess not frozen per say, but times that I couldn’t bring myself kill someone. Poor little Katya. Yelena. And James,” she continued. 

“For two of those you also almost died,” Clint added. 

“Luckily you made sure that didn’t happen,” she responded with a smile. She paused for a moment before continuing. “I’m glad you’re here with us this time, Steve. We’re going to need you to take on Yelena and Lida, but also I’m just glad you’re here as a friend.” 

Natasha felt safe back on the quinjet flying over the ocean. Something about hearing the engine sounds calmed her down after the stresses of the day. Once they had gotten the engines up and running and the autopilot set, she felt the exhaustion of the day start to sink in. Not just the physical exhaustion, but also the mental exhaustion. The snap had already torn apart most of her life, and Yelena seemed hellbent on destroying what remained. The spy in her told her to shove her feelings down and just try to carry on at any cost, but all these old wounds being made fresh made that impossible. Every even that she had shoved away in the past now came back to haunt her. 

Clint felt his mind being drawn more and more with thoughts of his children. He could see them playing outside or watching tv on the couch, but he couldn’t reach them. He hated these quiet moments on the quinjet, unable to forget everything that happened. He did not want to forget his children of course, just the pain he felt. Seeing Natasha’s pain made it easier for him to shove his aside to help her, but not in the quiet dark. Instead he laid in his bunk alone feeling the crushing weight of all he had lost. 

Steve hated the quiet stillness and had ever since he had woken up from the ice. He needed the constant movement to not remember, until Bucky. But now he had watched Bucky die not once but twice and the pain came back with full force. Bucky dusting away had reopened the 70-year-old wound that Steve didn’t know how to close. He knew from experience he just needed time for it to dull, but until then it was agony. Natasha’s new war offered him a distraction. He didn’t have to dwell on how they might have lost Tony forever. How he failed to be able to help Howard’s son. He didn’t have to dwell on the fact that Peter was only a child. He didn’t have to dwell on everything that had happened to Wanda. He only hoped that she was with her family again. He forgot about Bucky, just for a moment. 

Natasha thought back to the choices she had made that set her down this odd path she was on. She thought back to be cornered in that alleyway with an arrow in her leg. She thought back to her getting knocked out in the back of that van. Then she thought about the day that she had woken up in the hospital with Clint dosing next to her. She used to think that things had been complicated then, but really, they had been simple. 

Natalya groggily blinked herself away wondering where she was. It took her a moment before the events of the past day all came flooding back into her mind as she tried to determine where she was. She remembered the mysterious Shield agent holding his hand out to her. She remembered him setting his gun down on the ground. She remembered the arrow and she immediately reached forward to grasp at her leg. Her arms got tangled by the IVs and her head still didn’t feel quite fully awake. 

“Woah, woah be careful,” a mans voice said from beside her. She turned on the defensive to recognize the man that had spared her in the alleyway. His brown hair stuck up in every direction and he looked like he had barely slept for days. She noticed that he still wore the same clothes from Prague and her blood stained his shirt and pants. He moved towards her slightly and tried to help her with he IVs, but she jerked away from him. She came to the realization that she could move so freely; she wasn’t handcuffed to the bed like she expected. Perhaps he really had been telling the truth that he wanted to help her. 

“Where am I?” Natalya asked. She had attempted to move herself as far from him as possible in the little hospital bed, but a stabbing pain in her leg stopped that. 

“Hospital on a Shield base. I’m not allowed to tell you anything other than that,” he informed her. He had noticed her discomfort and had moved back into the chair he had been sleeping in next to her bed. She nodded understanding why. The hospital room housed a single bed and the chair that the man sat in, but really not much else. The door had no windows, but there were cameras in the corners of the room. She assumed that his superiors were observing them. 

“How long have I been out?” she wondered. She noticed there was not a clock in the room or anything to give her an idea about the passage of time. 

“The alley was about 24 hours ago. We got you back here. You had surgery on your leg. And then you slept until now. Your leg is going to be fine and you should be walking within a week or so. I didn’t hit anything important, but you running on it for a few blocks certainly didn’t help,” he explained. 

“Like I said before, a good shot,” she mused. 

“I just can’t seem to miss,” he smiled. They sat awkwardly for a few minutes in silence. Neither of them knew how to start the conversation that they really needed to have. What would happen now that Natalya had betrayed her family and come with him? Would he ever actually trust her? Who would the Red Room send after her and when? 

“Your name is Clint,” she said questioningly. She tried to remember back to what he had said in the alley, but she couldn’t be sure she remembered correctly. Her mind still felt groggy from the pain medication. 

“Clinton Francis Barton. And you’re Natalya Alianovna Romanova,” he replied. He used the same tone as her even though he knew exactly who she was. 

“Clinton,” she corrected herself. 

“Call me Clint.”

“You go by Hawkeye in the field,” she said firmly. This she had no doubt. She had heard about Shield’s Hawkeye and how he never missed his target. After speaking with him for these brief moments, she knew this had to be him.

“What tipped you off?”

“Who else in the world would have shot me with an arrow?” she said.

“Fair enough. The bow is my calling card. And you are the infamous Black Widow,” he answered. 

“So, what happens now?” Natalya said bringing up the subject they’d been avoiding.

“I don’t really know. Never really thought I’d get this far,” he confessed. His casual attitude bothered her slightly. No one in the Red Room would have ever dared to speak like that. He noticed her tense up at his response and realized it might not have been the most reassuring answer. She had far more to lose in this situation that he did. 

“Okay, I didn’t mean it like that. The first step to my master plan involved you actually taking me up on my offer. Now that you’re actually here it depends on what you want as well. We also have to see what the bosses are willing to do because I didn’t actually clear my plan with anyone beforehand,” he explained. He leaned back in the chair and stared up at the ceiling. Fury was on his way from DC to royally chew Clint out. Coulson had already told him that he was basically throwing him to the wolves for his decision. 

“I can’t go back. By now the Red Room will know exactly what happened to me and will have branded me a traitor. I have nowhere that I can go.” 

“I told you in the alley that I would give you a home. I meant that Natalya.” She didn’t know why, but when he spoke, she believed him. 

“Please, call me Natasha,” she said offering him an olive branch. In her time at the Red Room, she had always been instructed to be on a formal basis with all the instructors and guards. Her entire life she had been Natalya, until James. He had called her Natasha. For what Clint had done for her, she felt that he had earned the right to call her that as well. 

“Natasha,” he said with a smile. 


	13. Chapter Thirteen

Clint and Natasha landed the quinjet outside a small town in northern Florida. They’d found a section of woods to hide it in so it would go relatively unnoticed. Neither of them had been here since they had dropped Renz off the first time over ten years ago. The house that Shield had set Renz up in was only about a ten-minute walk from where they left the quinjet. He lived out in the country, so they hoped that they wouldn’t end up getting the cops called on them. 

Natasha braced herself knowing that they might end up fighting with Lida and Yelena at the same time. She had donned her signature Black Widow suit and had pulled back her hair into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She never made the same mistake that Katya had letting her hair swing around everywhere. Clint had also put on his suit but instead of carrying his bow he had opted to go with guns today. The bow proved nearly useless for the hand to hand combat he expected. Steve wore his suit as well, but he hadn’t brought his shield with him. He felt nervous about the idea of fighting two Widows. He might be a super soldier, but he felt sure that Natasha could kill him in the right situation.

A little house appeared in their vision as they got closer towards a clearing. A truck was parked in the next to the house indicating that someone was probably home or had been. None of the windows were broken and the front door was closed. It looked as if nothing was wrong, but they knew that couldn’t possibly be true. A little German that hung on the front porch blew in the wind. The poor man’s one last connection to his home. 

Swiftly and silently they all fanned out and started to approach the house. Clint when to the right side and hid behind trees to try and remain unnoticed to anyone watching. Steve did the same as Clint from the left side. Natasha got low and sprinted across the open area to find cover behind the truck. As she leaned against the driver’s side door, she noticed some blood splatter on the door, but it was at least a few days old. Dread filled her body. Yelena had been here, but she had most likely been here before they ever saw her in Russia. Already she knew that she had flown halfway across the world for a dead man. 

The trio all converged on the house. Natasha left the safety from behind the car and ran forward to the front door of the house. With her hand on her gun she gingerly opened the door and let it swing open. Natasha knew that Yelena wouldn’t still be there, but she made sure to be careful anyway. She stepped in the front door directly into the main living area of the house. Steve came in after her and Clint joined her from a side room where he had come in through a window. 

They all stood and stared down the hallway at a body tied to chair. The face had been badly beaten, but both Clint and Natasha immediately recognized Renz. Just when they thought that he must be dead, he lifted his head up to look at them. They saw the recognition in his eyes when he looked at them. He tried to say something, but they had gagged his mouth. Behind him on the wall someone had written “Was he worth it?”. 

Steve couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. All he knew in that moment was that he needed to help this man. He doubted that Yelena was still in the house because the smell told him that he had been tied to the chair for a few days at least. He started forward towards him, but after a few steps he heard a beep when he put his foot down. He made eye contact with Renz and saw the man’s eyes go wide. He had been trying to warn them but couldn’t.

“NOOO!” Natasha screamed. 

They saw the explosion as it started from the hall back by where Renz’s chair was. He would have died instantly from being that close to the blast. Steve threw himself down on the ground and curled with his back towards the explosion. Clint moved as soon as he heard the sound and grabbed onto Natasha’s right arm. In one fluid movement he pulled her back into chest and dropped them to the floor covering her. He felt small pieces of the house hit his back, but the explosion had been mainly contained to the back of the hallway. Yelena hadn’t meant to hurt them, just teach them a lesson. 

The explosion had been over in a second, but down the back end of the house was completely destroyed and the rest was starting to catch fire. Steve pushed himself back up to his feet and tried to make his way down the remains of the hallway to the body. He coughed from the smoke and felt sick when he saw the remains of the metal chair blasted apart. He glanced back to see Natasha staring with the same blank look he’d seen on her face in the alley. She looked completely broken. Clint still had his arm wrapped around her waist and was whispering something in her ear that Steve couldn’t hear, but she didn’t appear to hear him. 

“We need to get out of here before the cops show up. Someone definitely heard that explosion and will see the fire. We need to be gone when they get here,” Steve told them. Clint nodded and pulled Natasha towards the front door. She lost her dazed look and returned to the emotionless Natasha. They walked back to the quinjet in silence with Natasha walking about ten yards in front of Clint and Steve. 

She knew that Yelena’s goal had always been to break Natasha down before she would finally kill her, but she hadn’t expected to break so easily. In the past weeks she had never felt so powerless and each defeat just added insult to injury. Natasha’s heart hardened inside of her. She knew that if given the opportunity to kill Yelena she would not freeze like last time. She wanted to make Yelena feel the same pain that Natasha felt. But Yelena cared for no one, so physical pain would have to do instead. 

Once they made it back to the quinjet they came to the startling realization that they didn’t know where to go from there. Yelena had given them the clue before that led them to Florida, but now they had nothing. They were too close to the house to just stay where they were; the cops would find them too quickly. After a few moments of talking it over with Steve, Clint took them about thirty minutes north and landed them in a remote area in Alabama for them to regroup.

Each of them silently changed out of their suits and back into normal clothing. They moved like zombies unsure of what to do next; each one of them feeling the pain of what they had witnessed. Clint and Steve could at least remove themselves slightly from the situation, but Natasha could not. She wrestled with thought that in the last two days two people had been killed because of her. Two good people. They had not died quickly but had been tortured because of her. Tortured by people that she had once thought of as sisters, even as twisted at their relationships had been.

She separated herself from the others by leaving the confines of the quinjet and walking out into the forest. All she really wanted was to be alone with her thoughts after spending so much time with them. She leaned herself against a tree out of eyesight from the other two and did something that she had not done in years until this week. She cried. Everything in her body told her not to, but she just couldn’t hold in the emotions any longer. She knew that they must have heard her as her quiet tears turned into wracking sobs, but at that point she didn’t care. She curled her legs up to her chest wrapping her arms tightly around them and just cried. 

Steve and Clint had taken up position laying down on the back ramp of the quinjet. They closed their eyes and let the sun wash over them. Steve heard Natasha’s cries and felt his heart seize in his chest. He felt a different guilt in his chest though. He couldn’t help but relive the moment over and over again in his mind willing it to change. If only he would have not taken that step forward. If only he would have looked around more at his surroundings. Maybe they would have noticed the motion sensor and maybe an innocent man would still be alive. If only if only. 

Clint stayed silent knowing that the situation they had walked into had been unavoidable. Even though no one else would likely admit it, he understood that Yelena was not going to let Renz survive. There would have been plan A for his death all the way down to play Z. All of it with the purpose of maximizing the pain for Natasha. No matter the dirty details of her plan, the overarching plot remained the same. Break Natasha before killing her. To hear his closest friend in the world in so much pain cut him to the bone, but he didn’t know how to fix this. 

“What happens now?” Steve asked to the universe more than Clint. 

“I don’t know. All I know is that we need to end this before it breaks Natasha,” Clint answered. 

“I’ve always had this idea in my head about Natasha. She’s unbreakable. Before these past few weeks I would have thought that there was nothing that could get to her. Even after the snap I thought she must be the strongest person alive,” Steve confessed. He knew that every person had their limits, but he just never expected to see Natasha’s. 

“I still think she’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. She might be crying right now, but when the time comes, she will find the strength to end this. I’ve seen her do it before…” Clint said lost in thought. Steve felt the history behind his statements even though he didn’t know it. 

“I just hope she doesn’t end up losing herself along the way.” Clint felt the truth behind Steve’s words. He knew that Natasha was on the very edge and one more push would send her over. He remembered the feral girl he met in the alley and he knew what she could become. He shuddered to think about what she would do to Yelena and Lida if she got her hands on them. Her years at Shield had been spent trying to undo the mistakes that she had made in the past and unlearn the methods she had used. He had a sickening feeling that the Black Widow would come out again. Even though she still went by the name, the real Black Widow had been gone since Natasha joined Shield.

“A week ago, you would’ve said that I lost myself to my grief if you’d have seen me in Japan. Tasha pulled me back. I needed someone and she was there for me. I have faith that if we’re there for each other we might get out of this okay,” Clint said looking over at Steve with a reassuring smile. 

“She’s lucky to have you,” Steve commented. 

“I’m lucky to have her. We’ve stuck by each other for so long now that I really can’t imagine my life without her in it. Putting my gun down in that alley was the absolute stupidest and best decision I’ve ever made.” 

“You know until we all met your family, everyone on the whole team used to this you guys were secretly together,” Steve said with a laugh. He remembered Tony making jokes about the super assassins sneaking off with each other and he couldn’t help but feel happy. He even made Clint laugh with his comment. 

“Perhaps once upon a time it could’ve happened. But back in those days the thing that Natasha needed the most was just a friend. Her relationships from the Red Room were so twisted that she assumed that everyone had hidden motivations for everything. She needed someone to be there for her with no ulterior motives,” Clint explained.

“It must have been nice for her to have someone like that,” Steve said. Steve couldn’t imagine having gone through life without someone like Bucky. To not have anyone that genuinely cared about him. He didn’t know if he would have been able to survive at all.

“She’s better about it now, but she used to always look for the motives in people. I will admit though, most of the time she was right about the creeps,” Clint added. He thought back to his own experiences with Natasha when she first joined Shield. Even though she agreed to come with him, she had still doubted him. 

“I’m going to go see if I can talk to her,” Steve said. He left Clint laying on the quinjet and walked over to the tree where Natasha sat. She looked up at him as he stood over her and wiped away the tears from her eyes. 

“Can I sit?” Steve asked motioning next to her. She took a moment before nodding. He sat down and leaned against the tree next to her. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said firmly before he could speak. 

“Fair enough. What do you want to talk about?” he said unsure of where to go. 

“Anything else,” she replied tiredly. Emotionally exhausted she just needed someone to distract her if only for a few minutes. She worried that Steve would ask her too many questions that she didn’t want to answer, so she shut it down before they began. 

“We’ll probably be going back to Russia soon. Can you teach me a few phrases I might need?” After going to Russia, he realized that it might be good to learn a few essential and now seemed like as good a time as any. They had nothing else to do and it might take their mind off everything. Natasha glanced over at him and smiled. She remembered how she had enjoyed teaching Clint things over the years and those memories comforted her. 

“What do you want to know?” She moved away from the tree and moved to sit directly across from him. He would need to see her mouth moving for this to work. 

“How about starting with ‘hello’?” Natasha let out a laugh. Steve looked at her with a confused expression. 

“Hello is здравствуйте,” she smirked. Steve’s eyebrows went up in surprise. He understood the knowing laugh now. 

“Yeah I’m screwed.”

“Just try to say it,” she encouraged. He completely mangled his first attempt and the second, but she kept encouraging. She broke down the word into the different syllables (zdrast-vui-ti-ey) in order to help him. 

“Why is hello the hardest word in this language?” he exasperated after his fifth attempt. That time he had actually said it passably. 

“The sounds in this word are actually much simpler than many others. Меня зобут Стив. That means ‘My name is Steve’.” He said that phrase will little difficulty. Natasha actually found herself enjoying herself as she taught him new phrases. They worked over ‘извините’ for excuse me and ‘спасибо’ for thank you. 

“Okay so hello is definitely the hardest word we’ve worked on so far,” Steve told her. 

“Okay the next word means please or your welcome depending on context. Say ‘пожалуйста’.” Steve felt like he had just been confronted with hello all over again. He watched her mouth carefully as she broke it down into the individual sounds. Then he watched her do it a few more times. He tried to say it and gave a fairly good effort. Natasha could easily detect a strong American accent, but his effort made her smile. 

“You’re not saying the ж sound correctly, but I can still understand you. It takes a good amount of practice to get certain letters right. You can’t imagine how many times it took Clint before he could pronounce it correctly,” she told him reassuringly. 

“You taught him Russian?” 

“I taught him Russian and he taught me English idioms and slang. They taught us formal English in the Red Room, but idioms were completely lost on me,” she admitted. 

“I kind of get that. When I first woke up, I didn’t get any of the references people made anymore, even though I spoke the language. I had to brush up on my cultural references,” Steve said. He thought back to how difficult it was to follow some of the things Tony used to say. He always peppered in too many pop culture references for Steve’s taste. 

“I remember the first time Clint told me ‘see you later alligator’. I understood the meaning but was at a total loss as to why alligator needed to be included. He then informed me that the appropriate response was ‘in a while crocodile’. He had a good laugh about that,” Natasha said with a large smile. 

“I mean I’m inclined to agree with you on that one. That is a stupid phrase,” he agreed. 

“When I first came to Shield, he tried to give me nicknames. In Russian the diminutive for Natalya is Natasha. So, my friends and peers would call me Natasha instead. So, if someone wanted to give me a personal nickname for affection, they would use something like Наташенка. The first time he tried to call me Nat I thought he was calling me annoying. I thought he was calling me a gnat like a fly.” Steve couldn’t help but join her in laughing at this story. He imagined a young Natasha being very offended by such a simple nickname. 

“So, Natasha would never be turned into like Tasha or Nat?” Steve hadn’t realized that they had all been using the incorrect or unnatural nickname for her.

“Correct. And it’s actually Наташа,” she corrected. He noticed that although she spoke accent-less English she turned on her natural voice when she spoke her name. He did hear the ever so slight difference in her pronunciation. That let him to the realization he’d been saying her name incorrectly for years. 

“Oh, I’m sorry. I never realized it was wrong,” he apologized. 

“No need for apologies. How could you possibly know? I’ve never even corrected Clint,” she admitted. 

“Oh, why not?” he asked out of curiosity. 

“I don’t know,” she lied. 

“Natasha,” he prodded. She noticed that he tried to say her name correctly. 

“I like the way he says it. Somehow when he says Natasha it sounds…,” she started. She looked away from Steve’s face and back down at her feet. For a moment he couldn’t understand why she would look away from him as if embarrassed, but then it dawned on him. 

“You love him, don’t you?” Steve asked. He knew that she might run away from the conversation, but he asked it anyway. He saw her immediately stiffen and her eyes shut as she took in a deep breath. He prepared himself for her response, but he was surprised. 

“Of course, I do,” she replied glancing up at him with a sad smile. She pushed down the urge to deny it because she knew that Steve would know if she was lying. Once she said it out loud it felt like a weight off her shoulders that she had been carrying for years. For many years she wouldn’t even admit it to herself, but eventually she had had to accept it. Now Steve knew almost all of her secrets and she felt free. Steve didn’t even have a response prepared because he had expected her to vehemently deny it. 

“Have you ever told him?” Natasha shook her head. She had come close once, but then everything had changed. 

“He’s my best friend. I could never take the chance of ruining that,” she replied. 

“I can tell you one thing, Natasha. He loves you too,” he told her. He reached out to give her a reassuring squeeze on knee. She flashed him a pained smile.

“And just how do you know that?” she countered. 

“You’ve never corrected him on how he says your name. He says your name like that because he loves you,” he explained. 

“Did you know he’s one of only two men to ever turn me down?” Natasha pivoted. 

“I thought you said you’d never told him,” Steve said confused. Natasha just shook her head and started to explain. 

“I’m not talking about telling him I loved him. When I first came to Shield, Fury had a serious talk with me. He told me that if I ever betrayed Clint then they would kill me. He also told me to make it worth it to Clint. Whenever they told us to make it worthwhile for someone in the Red Room that meant one thing. You need to sleep with them. I figured that he meant the same. So, once I got out of the hospital, Clint showed me to the room I’d be staying in at the Shield base. I did exactly what my instructors had taught me, and I made my move to repay him. He told me that I didn’t need to repay him like that, and I would never be asked to do that again. The only other person to turn me down was James. I fell in love with both of them. I know what you’re thinking. I need to get higher standards,” she said ending with a smile. Steve couldn’t help but laugh. He also felt a pang in his heart at the thought of Natasha thinking she needed to repay someone like that. 

“That isn’t really what I was thinking. But…I will say dear god don’t lower them,” he warned her jokingly. Natasha laughed at the thought. She imagined that if she lowered her standards anymore it would open up every man in the world. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about James…um…Bucky I mean,” she said changing the tone of the conversation. 

“It’s okay. Can I ask a question about him?” Natasha braced herself because she knew that Steve must have a million difficult questions. She felt that she needed to answer them. He deserved answers. 

“Anything.”

“Did he remember anything? About me or anyone?”

“No. He didn’t even remember his own name. For most of the time that I knew him he was just the Winter Soldier, no name. I used to call him ‘Зима’ because it means winter. One night we snuck into Ivan’s office to look at his file. That’s when we found out that his name was James and that he was born a little bit longer ago that we thought,” she explained. She had always known him as James because they had no way of knowing that he had gone by a nickname for his middle name. Neither of them could’ve predicted that. 

“You said you loved him?” 

“I did. We used to meet up at night when everyone else was asleep. We dreamed of running away from the Red Room and starting a whole new life, but that obviously didn’t happen. Yelena found out and told Ivan. They sent him away after that.” Natasha shuddered as she remembered that day being dragged into Ivan’s office.

“What happened after that? After what they did to Katya, I’m surprised they let you live,” he admitted. She couldn’t help but agree with him.

“The difference is that Katya failed to complete her mission. I was the best. Instead of killing me, they just sent me on suicide missions hoping I wouldn’t come back. I always did. About a year after this I found myself in that alley in Prague,” she said. 

“Did you know what happened to him?” Steve asked. 

“After we’d been caught, they didn’t tell me where he went. And once I joined Shield, I didn’t find anything more on him except for ghost tales. That was until he shot me through the side on the mission, I told you about before. I thought when I saw him that he would remember me, and he would just drop everything. I let my guard down thinking he wouldn’t shoot me, but he shot me even as I screamed his name at him. I saw the confusion on his face, and I knew that the James I knew was gone.” He could tell by her face that she was lost in her own thoughts for a few minutes afterwards. He knew exactly how she must have felt on that day. 

“He could have killed you,” Steve told her. He tried to look on the positive side that at least the Winter Solider hadn’t killed her. 

“Clint was waiting for me at the rendezvouses point. When everything went to shit, he came to find me. The Winter Soldier tried to finish me off, but Clint got there just in time to scare him off,” Natasha explained. He had not been phased by her in the slightest, not like he had been when Steve called out to him. She reminded herself that it made logical sense. Steve and Bucky had been lifelong friends before his brainwashing, but Natasha had only existed in his world for a few months. 

“Thank you for talking to me,” Steve said after a minute. She had answered most of the big questions that he’d had. He knew that he would think of more, but for now her answering that many would be a gracious plenty. He could not have imagined that she would open herself that much to him ever. 

“Пожалуйста,” she smirked. 

“God, I’ll never be able to even say hello in Russian,” he joked. 

“Fine. When you’re talking to me or Clint or any close friend, you can say ‘привет’ instead. It means hello, but much more casual. I think you can handle that one.”

“Why didn’t you teach me that one to begin with?” he exclaimed. 

“Because I don’t want you to accidentally offend someone,” she countered. He just shook his head and repeated the word a few times to remember it. 

“I think we should go see how Clint’s doing,” Steve said standing up from the tree. Worry flashed across Natasha’s face as he pulled her to her feet. 

“Steve…” she started.

“I’m not going to tell him, Natasha. But I think you should though. If these past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that our time here is short.” Natasha only gave him a sad smile and started to walk back to where Clint was still laying against the quinjet. She felt a pang in her heart when he made eye contact with her and flashed her a reassuring smile. 

“How are you doing?” he asked when she got close enough. She slid down next to him and stared up at the sky. Steve hung back little from joining them feeling like he should give them a few minutes together. 

“I’ll survive. I feel so bad talking to you about grief though,” she said closing her eyes. Clint touched her on the arm to make her look him in the eyes.

“Tasha, I don’t have a monopoly on grief and I don’t want to. I want to be there for you like I know you’re here for me.” 

“But my pain nothing compared to you losing Lila, Cooper, and Nathaniel,” she pointed out. She saw Clint’s face contort when she mentioned their names as he tried to hold back tears. Before he could respond Steve decided to rejoin the pack and sat down on the other side of Clint. Neither Clint nor Natasha acknowledged that he had joined them, but he knew that they must have noticed. 

“I was just such a terrible father. I was never there for them when they needed me under this guise of protecting them, but in the end I couldn’t even do that,” Clint admitted staring out into the trees lost in thought. 

“You’re not a terrible father,” Steve comforted. Natasha had been formulating her response when Steve answered instead. She knew the exact counter that Clint would have before he even had time to say it. 

“Do you know where I was during the birth of my first child, Steve?” Clint asked turning towards Steve. 

“Not with Laura,” Steve guessed. 

“I was with Natasha on a mission in Norway. Coulson called and told me that I had a baby girl. Instead of immediately jumping on a plane back home I stayed to finish the mission and afterwards I went out to a bar to have a beer with Tasha to celebrate. What kind of father does that?” Clint said pausing for a moment. Natasha reached out to place a comforting hand on his shoulder. She remembered that day and knew that Clint left out some important details in his argument. He didn’t mention the emotions he had been feeling throughout the entirety of Laura’s pregnancy. She remembered his face when Coulson had called to congratulate him. He had been scared shitless. 

“That doesn’t matter,” Steve said.

“I did the same thing when Cooper was born. I had a mission to do and I left Laura alone.”

“That doesn’t matter as long as you loved them,” Steve tried to impress on him. 

“What do love count for when you’re an ocean away?” Clint scoffed. 

“It counts for everything,” Steve said thoughtfully. His mind flashed back to fighting with the Howling Commandos in Germany all those years ago. Most of the soldiers he met had wives hoping that they would come home when most of them wouldn’t. Many of them missed the births on their children as they fought for someone else’s children on the other side of the world. That didn’t make them any less of wonderful fathers. Clint had the opportunity to return home and that meant everything. 

“I wanted to be a better father than my father. I wanted to be there for my children. I just couldn’t seem to stay. Any chance I had I left them,” Clint said burying his head in his hands. He started to cry and Natasha wrapped her arms around him in a hug. Steve felt terribly as he watched his friend unable to help him. 

“Did you ever beat them?” Natasha said pulling Clint’s face up to face her. Steve felt his heart drop at Natasha’s question. This was the most information he’d ever known about Clint’s childhood. 

“Of course not,” Clint replied his eyes trying to dodge Natasha’s. 

“Then you’re a better father than your father,” she said firmly. The tone in her voice shut down the conversation for Clint to try to rebut her. They had had this conversation a thousand times before the snap and she was not keen to repeat it again, but she could not have him believe he had been a terrible father. She had watched him with his children as they had grown, and they had been lucky to have him. 

“So, I swear I heard some Russian from behind those trees earlier,” Clint said trying to change the subject. He wanted to distract himself from his grief again. 

“Yeah, I asked Tasha to teach me some. So far it’s a bitch to even say hello, so I might skip the pleasantries,” Steve laughed. 

They spent the rest of the afternoon talking together as friends. None of them mentioned anything that had happened in the past few weeks, but it felt good just to talk. They needed a day to talk and laugh together. Natasha tried to teach Steve more Russian phrases, which led to a lot of laughter on her part when he mispronounced something. They didn’t know where to go next, so they just enjoyed the time that they had in front of them together. It was the happiest any of them had felt in a long time. 

The day passed quickly as they laughed together, and soon night found them. Steve retreated back into the quinjet to go to sleep for the night, but Natasha and Clint stayed sitting on the ramp. For a few minutes they continued the lighthearted talk from before, but quickly that fell away. They each came separately to the understanding that now they needed to be serious about what happens next. 

“We need to finish this, Clint,” Natasha breathed staring up at the stars.

“What do you want to do next? You call the shots,” he replied. 

“I think we should go back to where this all started. All along we knew exactly where this would all end, but we planned her game. We need to go to the Red Room and kill Yelena,” Natasha said closing her eyes. As much as she hated the thought of killing her sister, she saw no other option. Yelena would not give up without a fight and now they had Lida to contend with as well. 

“Don’t worry. You’re not going back alone,” Clint reassured her. He placed his hand on hers and gave it a tight squeeze. Natasha had hoped to never return to that place. She knew that the flood of bad memories would rush over her as soon as she got close. She wouldn’t be able to push back thoughts of the years of training with her sisters. She would think of James too. But she had to finish this where it all started. Where Yelena had sold her out to Ivan and caused Natasha to lose faith in the program. 

“If…,” she started then stopped, “If I can’t take the shot, I need you to do that for me.” She looked into his eyes with a dead serious expression. He gazed back at her and nodded. 

“I never thought I’d go back. I don’t know if I can. Please no matter what happens, don’t leave me.” The overwhelming quiet desperation in Natasha’s voice made Clint’s heart break.

“I will never leave you, Tasha. You’re the constant in my life,” he admitted. They stared into each other eyes not daring to look away from one another. Time stopped for them. The pair felt themselves start to lean closer towards each other, but Clint jerked away at the last second. A look of betrayal flashed over Natasha’s face, but quickly vanished as she regained her composure. Inside her heart was breaking. 

“I need to get to bed. We’re leaving early tomorrow,” she mumbled getting up. Clint reached out to grab onto her hand trying to keep her there. 

“Tasha…” he started, but she pulled away. He wanted to call after her, but he didn’t want Steve to wake up and start asking questions. He wanted to explain it all, but he couldn’t. Natasha had been hurt so many times during the last few weeks putting her in such a vulnerable place. Clint didn’t want to take advantage of that. He would not do that to her. She was too emotional at the moment and he didn’t want her to do something she would regret. As much as he loved her, he knew that she would never feel the same. 


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Natasha dosed off to sleep slowly and restlessly that night. She found herself so lost in her own thoughts and emotions that she was unable to quiet her mind. Clint heard her struggling but felt unsure of what to do. She tossed and turned constantly until the early hours in the morning before finally falling into a fitful sleep. 

When Natasha opened her eyes, she found herself running at full speed down a dimly lit hallway with no memory of where she was. She heard voices buzzing in the distance but was unable to discern their language. Blocking out the unfamiliar sounds, she attempted to focus on the rest of her surroundings and listen for people close to her. She heard the soft footfalls of someone running closely behind her at top speed. 

She took a second to glance back over her shoulder, but the blackness of the hallway prevented her from seeing anything. Fear gripped her to her very core. The hallway in front of her seemed to extend endlessly with the further point fading into blackness beyond. Suddenly the footsteps behind her got closer and a person came into view. Yelena. 

This was not the Yelena that Natasha and the others had just seen in St. Petersburg, but the Yelena that Natasha had captured all those years ago. Her long flowing blonde hair blew behind her as she raced forward with a determined expression. Natasha flipped her head back around to face forward causing her to notice her long wavy red hair to flip into her vision. She existed in her 2004 form as well. 

“You can’t outrun your past forever, sister!” Yelena called almost playfully. Even as the words left her mouth, Natasha felt her legs start to tire from running full speed for so long. Breathing became more difficult even though Natasha knew she should have more stamina than this. She desperately tried to keep running until she felt Yelena grab onto her hair. The other girl came to a stop pulling Natasha down to the floor by her hair. 

Natasha felt the air being knocked out of her lungs as she smacked into the floor. Her head slammed down into the concrete floor making her dizzy. She blinked her eyes quickly to try and come back. Yelena stood over her staring down at her injured form. 

“You left us, sister,” Yelena said coldly. Suddenly those words echoed again and again as the hallway faded away into the studio at the Red Room. Natasha gazed up unable to catch her breath as all of her sisters appeared in a circle around her chanting those words. She tried desperately to scream or fight back but she felt paralyzed. She laid there screaming nothing except air as the circle of her sisters closed in closer around her. Her vision stared to fade until she fully lost consciousness. 

Natasha awoke with a start gasping for the air that had been denied in her dream. Her hand gripped the gun under her pillow as she tried to make out the dark shapes around her in the quinjet. She sprang into a crouch to not hit the ceiling with her gun ready when she heard someone make a noise in the bunk down and to her left. Her mind still had not fully woken up from the sleep, so she forgot about her companions. After a moment, she caught herself pointing her gun at a peacefully sleeping Steve in his bunk. Had the lights been on, anyone could have seen her face go red with shame at her mistake. She usually was not this delirious just after waking up. The Red Room had trained that out of her years ago. 

“Tasha, you okay?” She heard Clint mutter sleepily. Being in their line of work, he tended to wake up at even the smallest of noises in the night. He could undoubtedly hear her heavy breathing and deduce that she had had a nightmare. It had been years since the last nightmare night that he could remember. What he didn’t know is that they had started again once he had gone on house arrest and left the team. Not often, but they had definitely reemerged.

“What happened?” Steve murmured at hearing voices. 

“Nothing. Go back to sleep,” Natasha hissed. Sitting back down in her bead, she waited until she heard Steve’s breathing start to even out again as he fell asleep. She noticed that Clint’s had changed from sleepy to being completely alert. He made no effort to disguise it because he knew that she would be listening. He too waited until he heard Steve drift off to sleep before silently climbing over the gap between their bunks. He noticed that even though her breathing had slowed back down again she still felt very tense next to him. 

“What happened in the dream?” he whispered so softly she could barely hear it. 

“They were right. I did leave them,” Natasha breathed. 

“You couldn’t save them, Tasha,” Clint replied. He didn’t need her to explain anymore about the dream. He knew this dream like the back of his hand because Natasha had had it hundreds of times before. Slight variations had occurred every night for most of the first two years that she had joined Shield. Some had her relive her moments fighting with Yelena. Others had her confronted by the sisters that they had lost along the way. She had even dreamed of James coming for her before. The common theme remained. She had abandoned them. As far as he knew she hadn’t had this dream since James had almost killed her in Iran in 2009. 

For all of the pain that the Red Room had caused her, she could not completely turn her back on the people that she had known there. She had been raised in constant competition with her ‘sisters’, but they were the only people that might ever truly understand her. Because of this she carried this sort of survivor’s guilt around in her heart for years. Guilt that she was not able to pull any of the other girls out of the life with her. Even as much as she hated Yelena for turning her and James in, she knew that she would have done the same. 

“We need to sleep before tomorrow, Tasha,” Clint told her after a few minutes of silence. She gave him a small nod in return. She expected him to move back into his own bunk, but instead he moved to stretch out on the edge of the bed. A small smile came to her face as she remembered all the nights early in her Shield days that he had done exactly this to comfort her. His presence always made her feel safe. Not a cure all, but nonetheless he helped. She slipped down in the covers next to him close enough for their sides to touch.


	15. Chapter Fifteen

Seeing the abandoned facility from a distance, Natasha felt her blood go cold. She had left this place fifteen years ago and in all that time she had dreamed of what her return would be. When she first left, she thought that any day she could be captured on the street and pulled back to this very place to be tortured. She imagined having to look into Ivan’s cruel dead eyes as he ordered for her to suffer before her death. She had also imagined that he would have made each of her sister’s take part in the torture to drive any last remaining piece of humanity from their hearts. A chill ran down her spin as she shook away those thoughts.

She glanced back at Clint as he pulled the scope out of his bag to begin his watch. They knew that their arrival would not be a surprise, but he could not stomach walking in without any intel. Steve paced in the background every couple seconds glancing up at the other two. 

“I can see a few lights on. Someone is definitely home,” Clint said after a few minutes. Even though he could see obvious signs of life, no one had shown themselves yet. He knew that Yelena was too smart to walk out in the open like that, but he hoped her companions might not be. If she even had any companions. Natasha maintained that Yelena would not have brought any strangers into this final fight, but Clint and Steve weren’t so sure. With the unwelcome appearance of Yuri, Clint assumed that other former Red Room guards would also be back. 

“How are we planning on getting in?” Steve asked after a few more minutes of silence. 

“The front gate. There will be no surprising them.”

Steve could not shake the feeling that they were being watched as they marched up to the front gates without cover. Every small noise made him turn to make sure that no one had jumped out to attack them. He worried even more about the quiet and how a few good shots would take them out completely in the middle of the road. Natasha marched in front of him purposefully with Clint at her right, but Steve hung behind. 

As they walked his mind strayed to Bucky. Bucky had been here. Years might have passed since then, but it still left Steve wondering if any of his records still existed here. His eyes searched from any sign of his friend as they walked through the front gates into the main courtyard. Overgrown with trees and shrubs the abandoned buildings looked eerie. The main building in the front looked more like a Soviet prison than a home for young girls.

Natasha found her thoughts pulled in a similar direction as Steve’s. As she gazed up at the buildings, her flooded her with memories of James and her sisters. She remembered sneaking up to the roof of the main building to watch the stars with James. They had talked of the world that they could build for themselves outside of the Red Room. Outside Russia. James longed to rediscover the past that he had forgotten, and Natasha wished to help him. At that time, they hadn’t known his name or age, just that he had to have been American. She pushed away those thoughts as they approached the main building in the center. Her home for fifteen years. 

“She’ll be in the training room,” Natasha said quietly before pushing the front door open. Their rivalry had begun in the training room, so she had no doubt that Yelena’s intended for it to end their as well.

The lights were on in the dusty entrance hall. Natasha stopped for a moment as the scene from her memory played in her mind. A line of young girls marched through the entrance hall in full dress uniform to meet government officials. From there they would usually travel to the ballet room to give a carefully choreographed performance. Sveta had fallen once during one of these performances and the guards had beaten her senseless for it, but luckily, they decided to spare her. She had shamed her sisters.

Before Steve really had a chance to look Natasha led them off to the right side through a door into a long hallway. All the doors along the hallway were shut except for the one all the way at the end. Natasha stopped for a moment to collect herself as she gazed down the hallway that had haunted her dreams for fifteen years. She could not count the times that Yelena had chased her down this hall. 

“So, this is it?” Clint whispered to her. She nodded knowing that he must be thinking about her dreams as well. He reached out to place a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she started to move forward and pull away. Steve saw the pained look on Clint’s face as she pushed forward. Clint wanted nothing more than to leave this place that was clearly causing his friend so much pain. 

The trio walked slowly forward as quietly as possible down to the end of the hall even though they knew that the others must already know. Clint pulled out a handgun as they drew closer to the door. Steve wished that he had brought some kind of weapon or just something to use as a shield. They paused for a moment before stepping into the door frame. Natasha took a deep breath and moved. 

“So glad you could make it, little sister.” Yelena stood in the center of the room staring at herself in the mirror that covered the wall. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she appeared to be almost lost in thought. Only one other person was in the room, but Clint suspected that there were more waiting nearby. This time Yelena and Lydia clearly expected a fight because they wore suits not unlike Natasha’s and had their hair tied back out of their faces. Natasha wanted nothing more than to attack them right then and hurt them for what they had done to those innocent people. 

Natasha’s gaze flitted back and forth between Yelena and Lydia as she walked into the room. Both other women seemed frozen in their places. Yelena in the center. Lydia to the side staring at a piece of broken mirror with her back to them. The room looked different from the last time Natasha had been inside. Some of the mirror wall had been broken and never cleaned off the floor. The training pads were strewn across the room covered in a thick layer of dust. What bothered Natasha the most was the blood stains and bullet holes in the floors and in the walls. In her heart she understood. A massacre had happened here. 

“It was a few days after Lena had been captured. They brought us in for training in the morning, but something felt off about it. Ivan made us stand in formation with a guard standing behind each of us.” Lydia spoke calmly without any emotion betrayed in her voice. All except Yelena focused their eyes on her as she reached out to touch the bullet hole in the center of the broken mirror. Before she even finished knew how this story ended. Shield had told her that all traces of the Red Room had disappeared seemingly overnight, but Natasha had secretly hoped that her sisters had been transferred. In her heart she had always known what happened to them, but fear gripped her heart now that she actually would have to hear about it. As much as she had hated some of her sisters, they had a shared bond that no one else would ever truly understand. 

“This was my bullet. Not all of us caught on quickly enough though. Too much blind faith in our father. Seven of us managed to escape the room. You should be happy to know, Natasha, that not all of this blood is our sisters,” Lydia said turning away from the mirror. She moved gracefully away from the wall and towards a blood stain near Yelena in the center. 

“Victoria fell here,” she said making a sweeping motion to the stain. Calmly still she spoke and pointed out where each of their sisters had fallen that day. Natasha felt her body go rigid as she pictured each girl in their final moments. Thirteen young women with their lives cut short by the very people that had stolen them. She even shut her eyes for a moment when Lydia described how fifteen-year-old Sasha, the youngest among them, had cried for her “papa” to save her before behind shot in the head. Her sisters had been massacred in their own home as their father watched. 

“Stop,” Natasha said forcefully yet quietly taking a step towards the pair. Clint stepped up next to her with Steve following closely behind. Natasha needed Lydia to stop talking because she knew how it was affecting her. She forced herself to picture her friends’ dead bodies in her mind to try and steel herself for the fight to come. But how could she kill such broken creatures? How could she cause the death of more sisters in that room? 

“There were consequences to your actions, sister,” Yelena snapped. Lydia still appeared lost in thought as if she hadn’t heard either of them. In her mind she saw the scene unfolding before her as she had thousands of times in her head. 

“Seven of us made it out of the room,” Lydia continued, “but only five of us made it to the gates. From there only four of us made it to the woods. Out of the woods three of us made it out of the country. We were slaughtered like animals.” At those words she stopped speaking and resumed staring at the broken mirror on the wall. Steve could not take his eyes off of Lydia even as she stopped speaking. He remembered seeing scenes exactly like this one committed by the Nazis during WWII and he could only imagine the pain she must have gone through. He knew that she was extremely dangerous, but this girl needed help, not to die. 

“Slaughtered because of you,” Yelena said her cruel words slicing through the air. She turned away from the mirror and looked directly into Natasha’s eyes as she spoke. Clint watched her body start to tense like an animal before pouncing. He moved to step in front of Natasha to block her and get a better shot at Yelena in case she charged. Suddenly Yelena started to move towards them, and Clint fired, but Natasha pushed him off balance. 

“No!” Lydia screeched, but was drowned out by the sound of the gunshot. 

Clint and Steve watched unmoving as Yelena advanced quickly. Clint raised the gun again to take aim, but this time Lydia collided with him knocking him to the ground. He had been so focused on Tasha that he had not noticed the other girl barreling towards him. The fall knocked the gun from his hands and sent it skidding across the room towards the door. He tried to reach for it but had to pull his arms back in defense of his face as Lydia scratched at his eyes. Grabbing ahold of her wrists he swung her small body over to the side onto her back. Scrambling to her knees she lunged towards him as he tried to regain his footing. 

He kept scooching backwards on the floor away from her until Steve moved towards her to grab onto her wrists and throw her into the wall behind them. Unfortunately for Steve he held on for a moment too long and she latched onto him stopping the momentum. His arms were raised leaving his body exposed to a few jabs that did little to slow him down. Clint started to advance again but felt himself get distracted by Natasha and Yelena. 

Natasha knocked Yelena to the ground with a well-placed kick to the ankle. Yelena held the cry of pain inside just as she’d been taught as she fell down. In the moment she took to collect herself Natasha had already clambered on top punched her directly in the nose. A flash of worry passed through Yelena as she realized that her reaction time had increased during the years of isolation. Tears welled in her eyes from the nose punch and a little blood now decorated Natasha’s fist. 

“You don’t have to do this, Lena,” Natasha breathed. Yelena snarled in response and pulled her knee up into Natasha pushing her forward and off balance. Yelena had spent the majority of her adult life planning for this exact moment, but the reality of the moment changed her. She had not expected Natasha to be willing to show mercy. She then placed a blow directly into Natasha’s side causing her to wince in pain. Natasha flipped herself over Yelena’s body and away from her. Yelena pushed herself back up to her feet without taking her eyes off Natasha. 

“This is your fault, Natalya. You have to pay for this,” Yelena responded out of breath. Yelena charged again, but this time had her feet knocked out from under her by a pad thrown by Clint. Natasha glanced over at him for a brief moment to give him a small nod. 

“Its three against two, Lena. You are not going to win,” Natasha yelled. Yelena snarled in response. She picked up a piece of broken glass by her foot and sent it flying at Natasha’s head. Dodging out of the way, Natasha started to back away from the now advancing girl. With each step she found a few pieces of glass to fling at Natasha causing her to dodge more. 

Steve felt himself drawn out of focus as he heard what sounded like glass shattering around him. He glanced away from Lydia for a moment to see shards of the mirror flying at his friend’s head. His eyes immediately darted towards Clint to see him now aiming a shard of broken mirror to throw at Yelena. Lydia also noticed Clint’s aim and pivoted away from the distanced Steve to charge at Clint once more. Spinning herself like a ballerina, Steve watched as Lydia landed the perfect kick directly to Clint’s skull knocking him to the ground in seconds. Clint’s eyes looked hazy as he opened them, but before he had a chance to reorient himself Lydia pounced and slammed his head back into the ground. Again Clint had found himself so focused on Natasha that he had let the other girl have the advantage. Against anyone else he would have had faith in her to hold her own, but against Yelena he had been too worried. 

“Clint!” Natasha screeched, but she could do nothing to help him. Even in that brief moment of distraction she felt her arm sear in pain as the sharp edge of a mirror shard sliced into her. She dodged another shard, but felt her eyes drawn back to Clint as Lydia slammed his head into the ground for the second time. Her heart hammered in her chest as she tried her hardest to refocus on Yelena when all she wanted to do was run to him. 

Steve sprang into action at Natasha’s scream and started towards his injured friend on the ground. He grabbed onto Lydia by her waist before she could hurt Clint anymore and threw her against the nearest wall. Her body crumpled as it fell to the ground with a light thud. He had thrown her harder than he wanted, but it still did the trick. She winced as she tried to pull herself back up to her feet, but she had nothing to grab. The thought of Yelena made her force herself to her feet to try and get back to her sister. Steve stopped her in her tracks. 

“You don’t have Shield to come save you this time, Natasha,” Yelena snarled at Natasha. 

“And you don’t have the Red Room,” Natasha quipped back. 

“Oh, dearest Natashenka. None of us really ever had the Red Room.” Yelena said as she charged. 

Steve now had Lydia pinned to the ground under him to hold her in place as well as he could. She still seemed weakened from the wall hit, but he knew she would most likely weasel out soon. In such close contact he felt himself staring into her eyes and watching her desperation. For all the lack of emotion in Yelena, he saw her overwhelmed by it. Even as she struggled against his grasp, she did not look at him but instead had her eyes trained on Yelena the entire time. Then a question popped into Steve’s mind. 

“Where are the other two girls?” Lydia turned back to him and stopped her fight for a moment. 

“What?” she asked confused. 

“You said three of you made it out of the country. Where are the other two girls?” He half expected them to suddenly appear to attack him. Her eye betrayed the feelings she sought to hide from her face. 

“Dust. Just like half the world.” The words hung in the air like a blanket. He knew he should want to kill Lydia, but he felt his heart rip out for her. He even felt something in his heart for Yelena. How many more sisters would have to die for her to let that anger go? He continued to hold Lydia in place as they both watched the fight play out between their friends.

They had each armed themselves with broken glass and given each other a few scraps. Then suddenly Yelena stumbled as a piece of glass protruded from her leg, then another and another. Each step she took looked more and more difficult, but Yelena was determined not to give up. She would not, she could not stop when she was this close. Even then as she watched her goal slipping away. No one else had noticed that Clint had regained consciousness and had thrown the glass at her. Natasha seized the moment and, in a moment, had the glass against Yelena’s throat, but she couldn’t do it. Yelena tried to move away, but Natasha kicked her injured legs causing her to fall to her knees. 

“Please, Lena, I don’t want to do this,” she spoke barely above the whisper. The noise had left the room as everyone watched the fight come to a close. Yelena felt her resolve begin to crumble as she stared up at Natasha. All of her anger melted away to be replaced by the fear as she realized that she was going to die. She had prepared for this moment since she was a small child in the Red Room, but could anyone ever truly be prepared. 

“Lenechka, please don’t do this,” Lydia cried. 

“Lydenka, she caused all of this. She’s the reason they’re all dead.” Natasha heard the emotion slipping into her sister’s voice. 

“No, she isn’t, Lenechka. She’s the only one that was smart enough to run away,” Lydia said with tears streaming down her face. She still struggled against Steve, but he wouldn’t risk letting her off the ground. Clint stood very still not wanting to upset the balance of the room. He had promised Natasha that if she could not manage to kill Yelena that he would step in, but he couldn’t. After everything she might be worth saving. 

“She’s a traitor,” Yelena said her voice fading. 

“I’ll let you go. You can go home to Siberia. Have a home. You deserve to have a home after all of this. We all do,” Natasha said without moving the glass shard.

“You’d never let me leave alive. Not after what I’ve done.” Her mind flashed back to the bodies of all the people that she had killed to get to this point. Natasha would never forgive her 

“No one is too far gone.” When Natasha spoke, she let her eyes stray for the smallest second back to Clint’s. He felt a smile flash across his face. 

“They’ll hunt us down like animals. We can’t just have a life,” Yelena stammered. 

“Half of the world is gone, Lena. This is your chance to run and never be found.”

“Please, Lenechka, I don’t want to die here. I don’t want any more sisters to die here,” Lydia pleaded. At those words Steve loosened his grip on her wrists. She pushed herself out from under him and ran over to Yelena. She pulled her sister into a hug and away from the shard in Natasha’s hand. She kept pulling at her sister to get her to move steadily towards the door. She gave Natasha a nod as she pushed Yelena out of the door into the hallway. Before she disappeared entirely, she glanced back one last time to make eye contact with Steve. 

As soon as the other girls fled from the room, Natasha dropped to her knees and let the shard fall to the floor shattering. The emotions that she had been hiding inside finally escaped and the tears started to flood down her face. Clint rushed to her side and kneeing down he pulled her into a tight hug with his hand wrapped in her hair. Steve could hear Clint whispering into her ear, but not loudly enough to understand the words. He felt awkward just watching the pair, so he walked out of the room into the hallway for a moment to see Lydia and Yelena limping away. Yelena glanced back and eyed his warily, but Lydia gave him a strange expression. 

Wrapped in his arms, Natasha did not want to move for a very long time. All of the stress and pain of the past few weeks melted away as she cried. Ordinarily she would have shunned the thought of showing this much weakness in front of others, but Clint had seen her through everything. Natasha pulled her head out of Clint’s shoulder and stared directly into his eyes. She heard him mutter her name under his breath as he stared into her eyes. Natasha leaned forward and this time Clint did not lean away as she kissed him. Her heart caught in her throat as she leaned away and waited for his reaction. 

Steve returned into the room to see Clint and Natasha just staring at each other without saying anything until Clint pulled her close into another hug. Clint noticed him out of the corner of his eye and beckoned him over to join them. As he approached, he heard Clint whisper what sounded like ‘I love you’ to Natasha, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt like an intruder for a moment before Natasha looked up at him with a slight smile. He knelt down next to the pair and joined the hug. The trio knelt for a few moments more just clinging to one another for support. 

“What now?” Steve asked after a few minutes of silence. 

“Now it’s time to return to the real world,” Clint sighed. 

“Now we have to heal,” Natasha added. 


End file.
